The Family Unit
Liberals constantly claim that there are many ways to define a family.
This Holiday Season our TVs are flooded with patriotic symbolism: Marching bands playing patriotic anthems, military solutes using giant flag rollouts, B1 Bomber fly-overs, and every event beginning/ending with “God Bless America!”
I am a longtime, unrepentant America lover. I get shivers watching this stuff. But I know some people don’t. Some, like billionaire basketball celebrity LeBron James, are repulsed by demonstrations of patriotic allegiance to our country.
Do I find self obsessed narcissists like LeBron to be offensive? Yes, because they are so obviously ungrateful. But more than that, they are disrespecting our legacy of self sacrifice by those who died in the line of duty serving our country, protecting our freedoms.
Are a lot of the patriotic displays over the top? Are some more virtual signaling than sincere? Yes, yes and probably so. But it serves a purpose we should all embrace: Just like repeating the Pledge of Allegiance in elementary school, encouraging all of us to stick together as a family is critical to our survival. I don’t mean that in terms of warfare, I mean it from a practical cultural point of view. I worry about the Balkanization of America. Where the different ethnic groups form internal proxy governments and reject the established processes of governing. Then demand their own nation/state status. Effectively divorcing themselves from the United States of America.
That is tantamount to disowning or emancipating themselves from the family.
Liberals constantly claim that there are many ways to define a family.
There are single parent families, multicultural families, multisexual parents, spiritual and secular families, and whatever-works-for-you families. OK, if that is so, isn’t our country living proof that that is possible? You can leave America and move to Italy, but you will never be an Italian. Same is true of any other country on the Planet Earth. But anyone can move to America, and become an American. That is because being an American is not a nationalist brand. It is, conversely, an idea. It is a lifestyle, and once you adopt our tradition of living by the terms of our Constitution, legally become a citizen, you too, are now an American.
Donald Trump coined the moniker Make America Great Again (actually Ronald Reagan used the same campaign slogan), as a way of bringing a wide range of people together, as a movement. I suggest it was actually a call to join The American Family. To restore the concept that being American is believing in all of the concepts I just spelled out about forming a Family. He said, during his campaign, that MAGA was the biggest and most beautiful political movement in American History. One big family living under one big tent.
I would challenge that. Making America Great AGAIN suggests America has lost it’s way, that we just have to come to an agreement on what constitutes The American Family AGAIN…we have to reconcile our differences but more importantly recognize our common interests.
America is not, and never was, about borders, English language, our food or our legal system. It is now, and always has been, about the human need for freedom.
To determine the future for ourselves and our offspring. About reordering the power structure so people control the government and not the other way around. It is a notion that can get lost in the everyday workings of civil unrest and wars.
It is up to us to keep focused on what is imperative: Acting together to protect our family from any force that tries to divide us. Be that a weather system, an earthquake, a fire storm, or a foreign invader. The family Unit is the most successful defensive force on Earth. Unless we allow it to turn on itself.