Thinking about America in Terms of Names

This is a revised and updated version of a post I published in 2014.

In December of 2014, two New York City police officers were murdered as they sat in their patrol car. The killer ... who committed suicide rather than face arrest ... had threatened to kill police officers in retaliation for the killing of black men by police in Ferguson, Missouri and New York City. I found this justification a bit shaky, as he had murdered his girlfriend (who likely didn't have anything to do with the other incidents) in Baltimore before traveling to the Big Apple to murder random police officers, but I guess he had to justify it somehow.

I blogged about this at the time because one aspect of the senseless murder struck me right away - the names of the murdered police officers: Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.

I think it says something about this country that police officers of Chinese and Hispanic descent were on patrol together. America has traditionally been a country that welcomed people - if eventually and often grudgingly - from everywhere, and although we've gone through cycles of discrimination based on racial, national, religious and other factors, we are still the refuge of choice for those fleeing bad conditions in their home countries. The phone book of any town in America is a compilation of names reflecting virtually every race, color, religion, and ethnic origin in the world.

Many years ago a cartoon in Mad Magazine lampooned movie stereotypes with an imagined scene from a World War II film in which a sergeant was selecting men for a patrol ... "Okay, listen up! Jones, Martinez, Chan, Goldberg, Pulaski, Schmidt, Yokuda, Giordano, and Wegryzynowicz, come with me! Oh, yeah, I almost forgot ... you, too, Olafsson!" The point, of course, was that America's army was made up of people from everywhere, brought together by the common ideal that allegiance was owed to an idea - the principles of the Constitution - not to a family, king, emperor, or dictator*. No matter where you or your parents were from, if you embraced those ideas, you were an American.

Nowadays, sadly, the idea is wearing thin with many Americans. Der Furor and his MAGAts insist that all immigrants (not just the illegal ones) are ruining the country and “poisoning our blood,” and must be kept out at all cost, with those already here rounded up and deported with no regard for the law** or history. Granted, there’s a small minority of immigrants who don't come here because they believe in American ideals and want to become Americans themselves ... they want to retain (and impose upon others) the very hatreds, customs, and beliefs that created the conditions from which they fled. "Honor killings," ethnic or religious enclaves, and the desire to implement Islamic Sharia law*** come to mind.

I don't have the answer to the underlying problem of hating the other. I wish I did. But one thing I do know is that we need to stop viewing each other with hatred and suspicion and start working together to build the nation the Founders imagined.

A nation officers Ramos and Liu died to make safe for us all.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

* Yes, Mango Mussolini, I’m talking to you.

** Speaking of the law, wouldn’t it be nice of Congress could get off its fat partisan backside and update our immigration and asylum laws instead of trying to impeach the people trying to work with the mess we have?

*** To be fair, there are a lot of evangelical “Christians” who want to impose their beliefs on everyone else, too, but because they're home-grown Americans, they don't seem to see it as a problem.