“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness – let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough.
“Have you no sense of Decency?”
Ordinary American Joseph Welch, a lawyer representing the United States Army at a hearing in front of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Committee on June 9, 1954, uttered these words after McCarthy attempted to denounce one of Welch’s staff lawyers as a Communist. Mr. Welch changed American History in that moment.
https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures//investigations/mccarthy-hearings/have-you-no-sense-of-decency.htm
Basic human decency.
That’s the America – and the ordinary Americans – I know. I am an ordinary American. I am white. I am black. I am red. I am yellow. I am brown. I am straight. I am gay. I might be somewhere in between, but that is nobody’s business but my own. I am a man. I am a woman. I might be somewhere in between, but that is nobody’s business but my own, nor is whether I am pregnant or not. I am rich. I am poor. I might be somewhere in between, but that is nobody’s business but my own. I might own a tool described as a gun. I might not – again, that is nobody’s business but my own.
I celebrate the culture and traditions that came to America with my family, and I celebrate the culture and traditions of friends and people whom I don’t know — my family arrived in Philadelphia from Wales before Penn’s Landing became “Philadelphia” — 1680 — on one side and from Scotland –1840s — on the other. I welcome immigrants since I know our history. Whether voluntarily, by necessity, or involuntarily shackled into slave ships, immigrants have kept America — and what it means to be an American — alive.
If I have kids, I raise them to be curious, independent free-thinking adults who read well and understand what they read.
I do my damnedest not to hurt or harm anyone or anything, and my life is private to all who are not close to me.
As an ordinary American I don’t – and I won’t – live my life in fear of other Americans. As an ordinary American, I know that I can turn to and count on my fellow ordinary Americans to work together, united, to make seemingly impossible challenges possible. Ordinary Americans have done it before, time and time again.
I am an ordinary American, part of the melting pot that created my country and made it the leading voice for the once uniquely American values of freedom, liberty, and government by my and your consent, values that make America the light of the world.
Until we lose those values . . .
The history of the United States of America as written at this very moment (April 2024) is troubling. What was once the Party of Abraham Lincoln and Dwight D. Eisenhower has become the un-Reconstructed Democratic Party of the 19th Century in bed with the Nazi and Fascist movements of the 20th Century.
How did we go from Lincoln’s defense of what he considered to be Conservative ideals that apply to all Americans:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
to the desperate thrashing of a party so hell-bent on clinging to power that it suppresses other American citizens’ right to vote – their right to give consent?
Isn’t this ridiculous? This is not America.
As an ordinary American child who grew up during the 1960s in a place steeped in the history of the American Revolutionary War – Philadelphia — I celebrate my culture and heritage, and I celebrate my American Heritage, and how the America of my heritage has always seemed to find a better path for its citizens, an ongoing, often painful process for those who did not get a fair shake to begin with.
I am fortunate. I beat the odds of 25 to 1 against me being born an American Citizen my birth year, as one of 4.2 million American citizens out of the 104.6 million children born that year.
If I had not beaten those odds, chances are that I would try to come here, in hope of becoming one of millions of naturalized American citizens who are far more pro-American than the Aggrieved Pansies among us who were born here.
Our national anthem tells us that we live in “the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.”
Not anymore.
This is the land of the Aggrieved Pansy.
As an ordinary American, I refuse to accept that …
Besides the great fortune of having been born in the United States of America, I was born into an amazing extended family who sent 5 members – my Mom, Dad, and Uncles Bob, Joe and Floyd – to war to crush the Nazis and Axis powers, all of whom passed mostly from old age, except for Bob, whose airplane disappeared over the English Channel on return from bombing Nazis.
I know that what we witness today in America is not what they fought and died for so long ago.
Uncle Bob did not give his life, and Uncle Joe did not give up two toes to frostbite high up in the Apennine Mountains of Italy – fighting Nazis – only to have Nazis take over one of our once respectable political parties with their fear-aggression.
We are no longer the land of the free as evidenced by new laws and revocations of Constitutional rights that take away the unalienable rights of ordinary Americans – our lives, our liberties, our pursuits of happiness, our privacy, cynically, in the name of “freedom,” by other Americans who are so afraid of modern ordinary American culture that they believe marginalizes them in the same way as they have marginalized everyone else.
So let’s no longer describe them as:
Republican (they are not — Lincoln & Eisenhower are rolling in their graves),
Conservative (they are not — not since Reagan tripled the national debt), or even
Moral (they hypocritically attempt to project their own lack of morals upon us – see the “perverts” up Moms for Libertine’s behind who should be lubing doorknobs so their own kids’ hands slip rather than looting libraries).
They pine for an America that existed only in myth and are utterly fearful of what might happen if our kids might learn our actual history with all of its warts. . . .
They lost control and are utterly fearful that they will be told to go to the back of the bus.
They are angrily confused about getting aroused by others whom they believe are deviant.
They are afraid of everyone and everything.
They fear basic human decency.
They are aggrieved. They are pansies.
RIDICULE MERCILESSLY.