Monday, August 31, 2009
The enemy is not fellow Americans
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Jerri B. Etheridge
Etheridge, of Salem, is active in church and community affairs.
Many readers were surely saddened to see the publication of the words of Graham Brown on The Roanoke Times Sunday pages ("Selfish bigots masquerading as patriots," Aug. 23 commentary). As a Roanoke Valley resident of more than 57 years, I request space to respond.
First, let us acknowledge Brown's shame and urge him to reconsider. Brown says, "I am ashamed to be called an American." How tragic. Given the facts of history, Brown's ingratitude is jarring.
Does he forget that it is America and Americans who have helped more people from other lands than any nation on Earth? Does he recall that Americans fought the wars that saved Europe and probably the world from German National Socialism and its race-based dogma, and that American taxpayers helped rebuild the cities of our former enemies, making Germany and Japan into peaceful, productive nations?
It was America, which perhaps too slowly but in the end successfully, resisted the Marxist and Communist tyranny in the Soviet Union that murdered 30 million people, including approximately 7 million children. America gave support to the people of Europe behind the Iron Curtain, enabling them to win their freedom as we faced down the evil empire.
With Brown perhaps excepted, America remains a beacon of hope for immigrants. We do respectfully ask prospective citizens to come here lawfully and not make their very first act, their first step on American soil an illegal one. Is that unreasonable? No one is to say that America is perfect. It never has been. It is no accident that the very first Thanksgiving proclamation issued by the Continental Congress urged Americans to "join the penitent confession of their manifled sins whereby they had forfeited every favour and their humble and earnest supplication that it may please God through the merits of Jesus Christ to mercifully forgive and blot them out of remembrance."
Still, Brown's charges against his fellow citizens are ill-conceived and unwarranted.
Brown considers his neighbors -- those of us who pay our taxes, fight to defend our nation, work to heal the sick or teach children with no government mandate -- to be, in his words, uneducated, foolish, selfish bigots and people just pretending to be patriots. What kind of darkness inhabits the heart of one who would level such false and defamatory accusations?
Yet, even Brown makes some valid points. He says Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are all programs that are plainly socialistic. The government can, in effect, at times take your property and give it to others who otherwise would have no claim to it. I am 80 years old, and if Brown can arrange for us to return to a more voluntary and constitutional means for providing for others I want to participate. Until then, I hope Brown will concentrate on the many things he has to be thankful for and not see the rest of us as his enemies.
