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The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond

"O ye'll tak' the high road, 
and I'll tak' the low road,
And I'll be in Scotland a'fore ye. . . ."

Well, Donald took the low road
and he got to be President a'fore we knew.
He told us that he'd "tak' the low road"--
boasting about groping women because he could,
such a star he was, so irresistible he is--
and he gutter-sniped his way to the nomination,
promising us big, beautiful greatness
while insulting and humiliating other candidates.

And here he is:  in the White House a'fore them.

David Brooks says that human beings can be rallied around three things:  religion, tribe, or ideals.  America--this United States part of the Americas--was founded on ideals; not religion or tribe.  We hold these truths to to be self-evident:  life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Our founders, from all kinds of religions and tribes, wrote a constitution based on ideals.  It was not their intention to describe a holy American empire, or a White Anglo-Saxon kingdom.

As far as they could imagine it, they limned a nation described by ideals, among which were the freedom to be religious if you wished, or not, emcompassing the conglomeration of tribal remnants that we were.  But as expressly as they could imagine it, they said that we were not to have anybody's particular religion as the official one:  that was precisely what many Americans had escaped from in Europe.

And harder still for them to describe, more in ideal than in reality, they believed that all men were created equal.  We know how hard that was to strive for.  Women, in fact, waited until the twentieth century to gain the right to vote.  Many of the founders themselves were slave holders, admitting that it was wrong, but hard-put to rid themselves of it.  The whole nation nearly tore itself to shreds in a Civil War, and in civil wars still, to rid ourselves of white supremacy.

And here we are, today, still pretending that we are a Christian nation, Protestant or Catholic or both, but surely not a place for Muslims, or Jews except as they are our religious ancestors, and to be treated as part of the family.  Still today, somehow thinking that we are really a nation for white people, not brown people or black people.  White people aren't immigrants:  they came on the boat with Christopher Columbus.  Black people didn't found this nation:  they just built cotton fields and the White House.  Brown people are immigrants.  Asians are immigrants, just like the Innuit and the Mohicans and the Comanches and the Incas and the Aztecs and the Fuegians.

Every DNA test anyone has ever taken makes the notion of race a nonsense idea.  Every tribe ever to dance out from behind its trees or into its valley, is just a pocket of people who think their isolation makes them the center of the universe.  Just because every one of us has ancestors who can be identified by clothing or what they ate or didn't eat, does not indicate anything except that sticking together was a good idea.  A whole nation as a tribe is a bad idea:  then everyone else is an enemy.  We are bigger than that valley.

It is not just Donald Trump who revels in pretending that we are a religious or tribal America.  Lots of people do, and those are really bad ideas.  Be religious if you want to, or cannot help where you find yourself, and enjoy a tribal food as you remember having had Grandma make it (unless maybe it is lutefisk, in which case you should just admire your ancestors' lack of taste buds and possession of a cast-iron stomach) but that is where we come from; not where we are.

We are a nation founded on ideals, and those ideals were hammered out by people who knew we were not just a tribe, or a religion.  We still have work to do to achieve those ideals.  We are off the tracks right now, but if we are clear-headed and determined, we will surely get moving again.  

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