So, we United States of Americans, somewhere along the way, decided that we were simply and exclusively, Americans.  I guess there was a certain degree of “fuck you” to the more-North, Central and South Americans, but that would be a miniscule blip compared to the attitude we showed the indigenous peoples of “our” land.  Certainly, there was a lot of literal “fuck you” there as well, if you take ancestry.com seriously, (have you ever met anyone who has checked their DNA and not found out that they were some surprising percent Cherokee?), and figuratively, with the support of superior European technology, (guns), and exotic pandemics, (measles), that led to the systematic near-extinction of the Native inhabitants.  If you slept through American History 101, don’t fret that you missed this part, as it has been ostensibly swept under the historical rug.  To review, we are genocidal marauders who have, by sheer happenstance, melted into a pot of Europeans, Asians and Africans, free from the inbred borders of the countries we either fled or were dragged away from, who have thrived unlike any nation in the history of humankind.  I offer no reference material, (see, Over-Simplification), but anthropologists agree that it is the unique assimilation of diverse bloodlines that spawned the remarkable period of innovation that became our rapid ascension as cultural, economic and military leaders.  Yet, throughout our 240.5-year history, that thing that makes us the strongest, the most special, is the thing that persistently rears is intolerant head and will surely be our downfall.

We humans are born, after a give-or-take nine-month gestation, following a luck-of-the-cosmic-genetic-inseminational-draw.  Much of the pairing from our father’s and mother’s evolutionary history predetermine our physiognomy and yet credible science concludes that bias, bigotry, hatred, suspicion and intolerance, absent at birth, are traits passed down and nurtured by family, friends, tribes, clerics, pedants and pundits.  The clustering of like people and the submissive reverence to the strongest amongst those clusters led us, over thousands of years, to the territorial civilization that has produced the amorphous national map of the world.  The fear and distrust of “others”, even in times of diplomatic cooperation, holding desperately to the rule of those nations, is among our most lethal human flaws.  Man-made diversity, geographic, socio-economic and religious, even when inspired by the purest of intent, creates a pervasive and inescapable atmosphere of “us” v. “them”, when, in fact, (come on, big brain specie!), there is only “us”.

For we Americans, the freedoms and opportunities, (sadly more free and opportune for some than others), have been a near 250-year-work-in-progress.  The evidence of that progress can be chronicled as can the resistance to it, and today, when we should be at the apex of our evolutionary journey, we are, instead, in a backsliding freefall.  Our population has huddled together in exclusionary cliques, our sitting President, (too fat too stand), preys on the distrust and bias of those huddlers and our Congressional electees are quarreling over the rights of a million-plus “Americans” who have been schooled, employed contributors to our country’s culture, defense and economy with no roots or allegiance to any other nation.  How does any of this encourage us to believe in the dream of freedom and liberty and justice for all that was to make us the shining light for the rest of the world to emulate?