You know, one of my friends on FB joined one of those groups on FB. And while ostensibly I should know how horrific the commentary on that page is, it just horrifies me that people feel this way about other living, breathing people.
It makes me sick, and the fact that they are doing it in the name of the flag of our country, one that embraced immigrants from every walk of life and every nationality, just makes me want to throw things. I often wonder how many of these people actually have seen the "welfare abusing Mexicans" that they claim to be defending their flag and country from. (It doesn't hurt that most of these posts are written in increasingly illiterate forms of English). I don't know how to reach out to people with this viewpoint and try to help reach a compromise. It really bothers me to see such a divisive split in schools of thought, where any little bit of dissent is a bad thing.
Maybe I'm an over-educated college graduate liberal, but all I can think of is this wonderful speech from The American President, which is one of my top ten movies of all time. It says exactly what I want to, but far more eloquently. Thank you, Mr. Sorkin, for writing such an amazing speech.
America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can't just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the "land of the free". --Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas), The American President
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