Shining City (White Christmas In August, Part Two.)

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still. ~Ronald Reagan

*Raises Hand*

I saw this last night, some stupid idiot asking if people would want a Globemaster full of Afghan refugees landing in their town.

The question got him put through ratio hell on Twitter.

Good.

I'm fucking tired of these right-wing assholes and their smug assertion that there's something wrong with being a brown person, or an immigrant, or a Muslim, or a refugee. I'm especially fucking tired of it when I know that the people he's talking about are on the run from their own country because they or some member of their family helped us over there. I'm fucking tired of people who think that what color their skin is, where they were born, or whatever other stupid criteria they make up give them some kind of "right" to judge other human beings as lesser than themselves.

All the holy books say that all of humanity is equal before the Divine.

Our Constitution promises equality, even if our culture and society often fail to deliver it.

You don't have to be a "Uniparty Globalist" (Whatever the fuck that is) to see this. You only have to be literate, have the basic intellectual curiosity God gave a German Brown Cockroach, and not be an asshole.

I mean, fucking seriously, what's wrong with these people?

We are a nation of immigrants and refugees. This isn't a new thing. It wasn't instituted by some shadowy cabal or conspiracy theory. This is...and has been since the beginning...a defining factor of our national character.

And it should always be so.

It was right here, in the waters around us, where the American experiment began. As the earliest settlers arrived on the shores of Boston and Salem and Plymouth, they dreamed of building a City upon a Hill. And the world watched, waiting to see if this improbable idea called America would succeed. More than half of you represent the very first member of your family to ever attend college. In the most diverse university in all of New England, I look out at a sea of faces that are African-American and Hispanic-American and Asian-American and Arab-American. I see students that have come here from over 100 different countries, believing like those first settlers that they too could find a home in this City on a Hill—that they too could find success in this unlikeliest of places. ~Barack Obama

We are the first nation to have been a Democracy in the modern sense. The whole world is watching, the whole world always has been watching.

And it's watching to see what we do in response to the disaster in Afghanistan.

That is what we will be judged by, not so much that this disaster happened...but on how we react to it, on how we treat those who aided us, and on where we go from here. It was the same way before. The Vietnam War and its ending in the fall of Saigon and Operation Frequent Wind maimed our credibility for a few years, certainly negatively effecting the presidency of Gerald Ford, and ultimately enabling the Islamists in Iran and the Soviets when they invaded Afghanistan and started this whole mess.

And we'd forgotten the lessons of Vietnam, hadn't we? The lessons learned there changed the way we fought wars for a generation...and sure enough, when this began those lessons were still in force, but I believe familiarity and time bred contempt and laziness, the endless grind of 20 years of conflict became routine, and so we forgot the lessons. 

Certainly, some people never learned them. Certainly some viewed these wars as a for-profit enterprise.

It was the same way 50 years ago, in Vietnam. That's why we lost. We forgot...or never knew in the first place...what the hell we were doing.

But at the same time, those people who came over here from Vietnam have absolutely helped to make America a better place. We took those people in, and they became a part of us and by the time I met Vietnamese people and even had some in my Catholic school class...you'd never have known they were not always here. They may have ethnically been Vietnamese...but their hearts were, or had become American.

And it'll be the same with these people, won't it? It always has been before. In five years, or ten, or twenty...it will seem as if they have always been here. Certainly there have been Afghan people in the United States for a long time, but I'm talking about these refugees in particular.

In his novel 'The Kite Runner' Khaled Hosseini wrote the main character's father, Baba, as becoming a Republican while he acclimated to life in America. This was mostly out of (understandable) hatred of the Soviet Union and love of people like Ronald Reagan for standing up to its power. I see no reason (except that current Republicans do not want to) why American conservatism or the Republican Party wouldn't find a way to accept the Afghans, who are naturally pretty conservative and, if treated well, could become the 21st century equivalent to the Cubans who fled Communism and mostly became Republicans.

The Republican Party could easily find a way to accept these Afghans fleeing Radical Islam.

Except that they're stupid racist assholes and they don't want to.

Or at least, most of them don't. There are certain exceptions.

The governor and legislature of Utah, for example, stood up to be counted on the right side.

As the governor points out, his state was founded by people fleeing religious persecution. Given the climate and terrain of Utah, and the character of its people, I think the Afghans would be a good fit there, too. The state already has a decent-sized Muslim population, and other conservative religious ethnic groups like Pacific Islanders are also well represented in Utah.

So it makes sense that the governor and the legislature would do what they've done here and offer to help the refugees. 

And it's not an unsurprising development for the spiritual descendants of Joseph Smith, who was often called "The Yankee Mohammed" at the time when he was founding the religion that became Mormonism.

Like I've said, what has become of conservatism and Republicanism is not what I was taught. There's a reason I quote people like Ronald Reagan. Likewise, modern liberalism certainly is less 'Leftist' in this country than some people would like...so often in the same vein I can also quote Barack Obama. The American tradition requires both elements, liberalism and a sane conservatism...and what we've got at the moment sure ain't that. Far too many Republicans aren't actually conservatives, or Republican in the sense of what that word means. Too many of them are basically old school racist, segregationist Democrats. And where my current party shows little evidence of that past, Republicans have adopted it wholeheartedly...while still trying to push the blame for it onto other people.

It is they who, in all respects, would douse the light of Reagan's Shining City.

Because they think by doing so, they would hurt somebody else more than themselves.

But don't we all live here? Aren't we all in this together?

What happens to one, will happen to the other eventually.

It need not be this way. This is America, we can do better than that.

Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and the overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this ancient Holy Land, the House of Abraham, Muhammad, and all the other Prophets of the Holy Scriptures. For the past week, I have been utterly speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed all around me by people of all colors. . . .You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This was not too difficult for me. Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.

During the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept in the same bed (or on the same rug) -- while praying to the same God -- with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. And in the words and in the actions and in the deeds of the "white" Muslims, I felt the same sincerity that I felt among the black African Muslims of Nigeria, Sudan, and Ghana.We were truly all the same (brothers) -- because their belief in one God had removed the "white" from their minds, the 'white' from their behavior, and the 'white' from their attitude. ~Malcolm X.

Part One.

NOTE: As regards the series title, the code-signal for the Operation Frequent Wind helicopter evacuation on April 29th, 1975 was "The temperature is 105 degrees and rising" followed by the playing of the song "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas."