Why We Call It US
This entry was posted on 10/13/2008 11:41 PM and is filed under Added Articles.
Lately and more and more when we see headlines in newspapers that read: US housing collapse jeopardizes millions. Or when we watch troops off to war with US stamped on their equipment, or even watch athletes at the Olympic Games put their years of training into practice with the US monogram prominently displayed on their uniforms, I am struck by the cosmic coincidence of the word that that acronym spells. US is the United States and the United States is us.
It is not random parts crudely cobbled together, or a collection of some parts, to the exclusion of all the remainder. It’s never a subset of thems or others. It’s always US. This single idea represents the purest representation of what our democracy means and our politicians must stand for. It is US without exclusion or exception. Though we may disagree among ourselves, those who would intentionally seek to divide us against each other, one part against another, by spouting nonsense about “culture wars”, or practicing economic elitism or engaging in ad hominem libels or personal attacks of political annihilation against their political opponents by slurring their patriotism, their religious beliefs or their backgrounds, are enemies of what this country is all about and ultimately enemies of US, all of us, even eventually to the detriment of those they are nominally working for.
That’s why they call it US. We can only rise together and fall separately. Our troops fighting overseas are us and we are them. Separatist politicians who demagogically try to usurp or continue their great sacrifices for use as cover for their own party’s failures are not worthy of their offices.
No one part of this country may ever secede from or imagine themselves superior to, or profit extravagantly at the expense of the rest of the country without attacking the unity of the democratic consensus which holds the structure together and has held the key to our greatness. That’s why we call it US and it is the United States.
We are not our economy. Our economy is us. We are not our corporations. We aren’t Wall Street or bankers or insurance companies, pharmaceuticals, lobbyists, usurers, politicians or oil companies. We are US. The people of the United States. That we are us without exception is exactly what has made us so exceptional. The entirety of us is infinitely greater than the sum of a few of our parts.
If the government focuses on the well being of its people first, which is the only basis on which the government was instituted to begin with, our corporations will prosper by themselves, innovation will flourish, and the energy of the nation will be properly channeled as it has (almost) always been before. But when politicians support only corporations, obsess over odd divisive theories for their own personal or political aggrandizement, or grovel after big moneyed interests in order to promote some unworthy factions over others equally or more legitimate, there will be no such bracing reciprocity devoted to the public good forthcoming or guaranteed.
If elected the job of the democrats is to heal these divisions, redress these economic wrongs and find the proper fulcrum points to make the tax burden fair, to spread the American wealth throughout the whole economy and to ensure that the engine of economic creation goes to help all Americans equally according to their abilities and desires. Government must reassume the high, principled, middle ground; and center us again between the interests of the rights of the few and the ideals and responsibilities of the many. It must regulate us from those whose mistakes would be so great that they could not be tolerated or sustained. The proper conclusion to the old slogan, “the business of America is..?” is its people. And only its people.
We are one people which is not only the strength but the necessity of democracy. Those who would devide us for short term interests, prejudices, elections and predatory profits betray our trust and are foreign to our ideals. Politics can never be made about lower case us vs. upper case US. Because they are one and the same.
