America the Great: What Would the Founding Fathers do in this era of Trumpian Republican Idealism?

We approach Jefferson with the sun at our backs, reflecting off the Potomac. Wisps of wind drift through the illuminated and commanding marble pillars. It is silent and there is an unmistakable power here.

Growing up, the Fourth of July was always my favorite holiday. I loved the BBQing, swimming and fireworks, of course, but the real reason I loved it so, was because I always felt a genuine pride and appreciation of being American.

We are raised to think the United States in the best nation in the world and I always subscribed to that belief. At UCSC – surrounded by an intensely historically and socially aware community – my perspective was shifted, but not upended. I was educated on the dirty underbelly of our history and exposed to truths about the structure of our society and economy. I did not know the extent of systemic disenfranchisement of black men in America, or the fact that we rejected Jewish refugees at the outset of WWII. I did not realize how close segregation actually was to our time or truly understand that the 2008 financial crisis was actually caused by Wall Street greed. I never really learned about Japanese internment or the atrocities of the Trail of Tears. I still thought Columbus discovered America. As much as getting a B.A. was about earning a college degree, it was just as much about learning general American history. Prior to higher education, I had been given the glossed over, palatable version of American history. The one where we are the hero, the visionary the superpower that always used its power for good.

The great irony here, is that I am still proud to be American. What we are built on is revolutionary and visionary and beautiful. The dirty underbelly of our history is not America; it the effort of those who sought to destroy America. The America that I am proud of and proud to be, is the one who has persevered through the hate. Through the vitriolic nativism and ignorance. Through the fear and apathy. Through the amnesia and cowardice. She has always been there and it is remarkable that she is still fighting. America won the civil war, ended segregation and has welcomed refugees since it’s inception. That is a legacy to be proud of.

In this current political field, the need for us to understand our true history has never been more important.

Standing in the Jefferson memorial with tears in my eyes, I felt vindicated; my pride was valid. It is all there, literally written in stone: unaltered wisdom, three hundred years old that is still profoundly relevant today. Rhetoric that reads like a rebuttal to all that has been espoused at Republican debates. Words that feel more prophetic than as a static relic of our history.

We tend to treat the constitution and the words of our Founding Father’s as ambiguous; approaching modern political issues with an attitude of “if we only knew what our Founding Father’s would have wanted.” We do. They said it, and it still applies. Do we need to institute a mandatory field trip for members of congress to visit the Jefferson memorial?

In a room full of deeply philosophical and beautiful text, perhaps the most salient excerpt of our time was his articulation of the need for adapting law to be in accordance with natural progress:

"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

If that doesn’t sound applicable to gay rights, climate change and economic policy, then perhaps you are too entrenched in your own political stalemate to accept reality.

Standing in this grandiose marble room, I am deeply moved. Sage words that should send shivers down your spine and put goosebumps on your arms, for they are an inalienable and beautiful exhibition of our foundation.

If you are among those who want to “Make America Great Again," remember that the inscription on the Statue of liberty reads:

"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-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Our nation’s foundation is “progressive.” If cannot see that, you are lost and trying to retrieve something that was never truly American anyway.

In defense of a literature major.

I majored in literature because words, characters, stories and rhetoric (oh, the rhetoric!) make my brain tingle and spark like nothing else. I developed an insatiable thirst for the aha moment ─ that beautiful fraction of a millisecond where your brain instantaneously and miraculously adjusts to the light. I am continually trying to achieve that first high, like the first time I read Swift and knew satire, brilliant, deliciously smarmy satire.

In accordance with the Orwellian thought, I view words as the conduit between floating pictures and a critical engagement with the world. Orwell was fixated with the notion that vocabulary and consciousness were inexorably linked ─ limiting one limits the other. In 1984, he writes about "newspeak" and how with its advent "every year, fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller." Though we are not existing in a dystopian society in Orwell's mind, (but I don't want to rule anything out...) the argument stands and places appropriate emphasis as to the paramount importance of words and their contribution to our reality.

The reality we construct for ourselves is flimsy at best, and feeling disassociated with my reality was simultaneously the best and worst thing that happened to me. Daylight prickled the skin in an uncanny, unreal way. I saw the whole of humanity spread on an endless tapestry of fruitless attempts to deny and overcome our plight.

A lonely place but lovely none the less; what is paradise without purgatory? What is reality without the surreal? How can you truly know beauty and authenticity without seeing the ugliness and the triviality? How can you find purpose without first accepting your banal plight? The novelty of that "knowledge" wears off though and it left me suddenly so irrevocably and totally alone.

In literature though I met minds asking the same questions and grappling with the same "truths" and suddenly my world was not so lonely anymore; there were others occupying the same lonely space as me.

In the pages of Faulkner, Chopin, Twain and McCarthy, I found my mind. Nestled in the darkness and radiance and balanced between nihility and sublimity, I realized that words allow me to see myself; the swirling chaos of thought, the irrelevance and flimsiness of reality, incredibly becomes a little more tangible.