“I’d like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
I’d like to buy the world a Coke
And keep it company
That’s the real thing”.
Coke ad, “Buy the world a Coke,” Hilltop commercial, 1971
“We are the world, we are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day
So lets start giving
There’s a choice we’re making
We’re saving our own lives”
By the supergroup Food Aid for Africa: “We are the World,” 1985
“Global” used to be a good word.
Now “global” is a bad word in some circles, the supposed cause of misery and national failure.
At the United Nations this week, Trump spoke at length about immigration and racial/ethnic mixing:
If you don’t stop people that you’ve never seen before, that you have nothing in common with, your country is going to fail. I’m the President of the United States, but I worry about Europe. I love Europe. I love the people of Europe, and I hate to see it being devastated by energy and immigration. This double-tailed monster destroys everything in its wake, and they cannot let that happen any longer. You’re doing it because you want to be nice, you want to be politically correct and you’re destroying your heritage.
I have a different view. Immigration is American heritage. President Trump is riding a wave of sentiment about immigration, and we are at full tide. It is hard to weigh in against the tide, but in the longer view, I recognize that the waves come and go. Trump is laboring under a misunderstanding. The true American Volk has always been a lumpy melting pot undergoing change.
America has never been an imagined first “real” American of a White Protestant Christian from northwest Europe. From the very beginning, the two groups of religious dissidents in Massachusetts, the “Pilgrims” in Plymouth arriving in 1620, and the “Puritans” who started coming to Boston in 1630 -- 40 miles apart --were in severe disagreement about how best to separate from or purify the church. When our country started in the 1770s, there were Protestants from England in Massachusetts; Germans and Quakers in Pennsylvania; the Dutch in New York; Roman Catholics in Maryland; Blacks imported from western Africa, living in slavery; and the indigenous people already here, sometimes in and sometimes outside the polity. The Constitution and Bill of Rights linked freedom and tolerance for minority rights so that the different people in different regions could live together in a single nation.
That early nation was changed over the centuries by waves of immigrants from different places. My mother’s people came from Greece 120 years ago. My wife’s family came from China 70 years ago. The people who help me tend my grapes came from Mexico, here legally, arriving in the past 20 years.
Let me recommend once again the Medford Multicultural Fair. It celebrates that American heritage. It is a feel-good gathering of music, dancing, home-country costumes, booths, ethnic food trucks, and activities for kids. It is at Medford’s Pear Blossom Park next to the Lithia Building from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. tomorrow, Saturday.
Global is retro but it current, too. Global is all-American.
What makes America great is the ability of people from many different cultures to live and work together in relative harmony. Now we have a White Nationalist president and his cult trying to destroy our union, just as the Confederacy did once before. May they meet the same fate.
Over the years, I have found the metaphor that America is a melting less and less accurate. In my my mind, a melting pot blends ingredients together to produce one entree. In the process, the ingredients lose their individual characteristics and taste. I, rather, have come to liken the United States more to a tossed salad made up of many different and distinctive ingredients delicious, in their own right., However, when taken as a whole,, the salad becomes a complex culinary delight.