Just to be American......

I wrote this eight years ago......been buried ever since.......

This year I get to be 62 years old. I don't think that's so old anymore. Except when I talk to young people. I remember when seems to be in a lot of my conversations with young people. I remember events that they've only heard about and that's if they paid attention in their history class.
I remember W.W.II. I remember paper and tin can drives and Victory Gardens. I remember the maps on the front page of the newspapers. I remember ribbons in the windows or on the doors signifying a son or husband in the service and I remember the wreaths when someone was notified that their son or husband had been killed in action. There were no KIA's or MIA's in W.W.II. No euphemisms for death.
There was great sorrow for those who would not return. But there was pride that those lives had been given in a just cause. I remember how proud I was to be American. I knew that being born American was one of the best things that could happen to a person. Just to be American was to be envied all around the world. Just to be American was to be welcomed in every corner of the world. Well, almost every corner of the world. Those corners of the world where people were struggling to be free. To those people, just being American was a dream, to come to America, to live and work in America. To be American. Just to be American.
And no matter how or when we came, we are Americans and in my heart I know, with all our flaws, our inherited prejudices and our fears, this is still a country where all of us, every creed and color, every mongrel one of us can stand together and take pride in being American.
And I am not deaf or blind. I hear the complaints about the invasion of Asians and South Americans and eastern Europeans. How 'they' are living on the largesse of 'our' welfare system, how 'they' are taking 'our' jobs, how 'they' are taking over 'our' communities. And I know that most people are just complaining for the sake of complaining because that is exactly how we all came to be Americans.
But there are other people out there. People who do more than complain. Real people who burn churches and synagogues, people who hate for reasons known only to themselves and not always then. People who attack and often kill other people for no other reason than they are black or white or Jew or Moslem or gay or straight or maybe green or purple.
And these people are Americans too. Despicable Americans certainly. Cowardly and obscene Americans surely. But Americans nonetheless. And they are as necessary to our society as everyone else. For in order to be good, we must have evil to overcome. Overcoming the old-world evils, the tribal hatreds and blood feuds of the countries of our parents origins is what makes America unique. We are all Americans. The bond that makes us strong, the bond that makes us just Americans.