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The saddest take away I get from your article is that it represents just how deep the riff between us is growing. Like “brother against brother” events of the Civil War, our dialogue now is
an either-or confrontation which even divides families and separates from beloved family members from one another. My mother was a liberal, my father a conservative. Until death separated
them, they spent 58 years respecting the opinions and values of one another. Could that happen today? When Jimmy Carter was president, he decried the lack of civility beginning to take hold
in America and was ridiculed for his observation. Now, of course, incivility marks most of the conversations between those whose values drive them to seeing our various national issues in
differing lights. The issue of racism is rooted in America’s acceptance of slavery which could and should have been addressed and ended when the Constitution was formed. Similarly, women’s
rights ought to have been protected from the outset. But neither was addressed so the problem was merely kicked down the road for the next generation, creating the seeds of the Civil War. I
have seen recently attempts to deny the shames of slavery, the barbarism and lack of morality it represented. These are evil attempts to rewrite history and cannot help our nation begin to
address or heal the racism legacy the Civil War and Revolutionary War failed to resolve. I want to live in an America which is true to its claims, to the values upon which it was formed. A
nation which proclaims that “All men are created equal” should act as if they were. A nation which wrote freedom of speech into its Bill of Rights should not send armed forces, now being
supplied with military hardware, to suppress crowds engaged in peaceful protest. And a nation which said the role of government was “to insure peace and provide for the general welfare”
should not be taking health care from its citizens and giving unwarranted tax breaks to its wealthiest 1%. I think that we need less dialog/confrontation about our differenes and more
discussion of how we can begin to have the America our founders envisioned. If we are to “make America great again,” we must fully commit to the principles that made it great in the first
place.