A Nation of Ignorance Is More Like It
It is becoming silly and redundant to incessantly belabor on the candidacy of Donald Trump and his faux pas on everything. What is more concerning or disconcerting rather, is the number of people who gravitate to Trump, of whom are inspired by his incoherent ideologies, most particularly the apparent shared stance on immigration.
The prevailing truth is that this is a Nation of Immigrants
It shouldn’t come as a shock to any American, let alone people from around the world that this nation thrives as a superpower due to it’s de facto immigrant nation status. The concept is actually engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in the form of a sonnet called The New Colossus which is inexplicably an open invitation to a land of shared independence and opportunity.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Not the apparent stream of nativism being advertised today that has entered stage right through our politics, veering way off course primarily from the conservative wing, but not entirely exclusive to it, as I am sure it is silently shared among some on the left as well as the middle.
It has become a tired rhetoric of sorts which inadvertently portends to the larger more pronounced issue that America has become this Nation of Ignorance. Immigration is part and parcel the overriding factor in the unbridled and undiminished influence of the United States on the national as well as global scales. No one ethnic, religious, racial, nor so-called original inhabitants (whatever that means), whether anchor baby or not can solely claim credit for this phenomena.
In fact while most developed or developing nations are stunted socioeconomically by bouts of brain drain, this nation seems to always be on the receiving end. It is why the U.S. (yes, as in us, together) is constantly winning in this arena. Spare me and the other rational and informed nation of immigrants who see the advantages of diversity and embrace it with the hope of advancing humanity, and not hell-bent on destroying it with the ignorance that comes with racial animus.
America has this unique distinction that isn’t readily acceptable as the norm anywhere else and is hard pressed to be replicated. It is not possible for me to go to China, seek citizenship and claim to be Chinese. Even in the UK, those who are not natives but born in the UK are merely seen as UK citizens and not Britons. America should embrace this has prestige, and not the wayward fashion of privileging nationalists being flaunted unabashedly. That would be so un-American.
