Donald Trump’s campaign slogan is “Make America great again”. Conservative Republican politicians and personalities also speak about the need to “make America great again” and have been doing so for years. But hate does not make America great. Hate speech is used only to divide people and create an “us against them” mentality. Hate means one group must rise up and be supreme rather than all groups working together as equals to find solutions. So why does Donald Trump use hate speech? Why would any politician use hate speech? Sadly, the simplest answer is that it works. People get angry. They send in money to support the candidate. They share the candidate’s words on social media. Most importantly, they vote! Sometimes the speech is not overtly hate-filled, but the message is always clear that people must take back the country from the losers, abusers, lazy ones and foreigners who are ruining this great nation.
Our country has already seen what hate from within can do. After four years of war, not with another country, but among the very States who had joined together to form our country, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated because of hate. He ended his Second Inaugural Address with the words:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
We have not listened well. There are those who refuse to let go of their hate and choose instead to continue to inflict harm rather than try to “bind up the nation’s wounds.” The viciousness with which the civil rights movement was met, the lives that were lost and continue to be lost for no other reason that the color of one’s skin demonstrates just how far we have still to go. Hate continues to destroy and is so much more powerful when it becomes political speech uttered by those wanting to win elections. Their words are beyond unacceptable. They, who choose hate, are not fit to govern. They will never make America great.
What makes America great is not that we are perfect, but that we know and acknowledge our imperfections. That we take steps to move forward, to make amends, to correct what was wrong, even when those changes seem to take so very long. What makes America great is that we welcome the stranger knowing that we were all strangers who came together to create something new, something that could have easily failed but didn’t because more people fought and continue to fight to see our country and its once untried democratic form of government succeed than those who fight to see it destroyed.
Moderately liberal, liberally moderate, American flag waving Democrat! Bachelor of Arts in History with concentration in Early American History and Abraham Lincoln
Graduate student pursuing a Master of Arts Degree online in American History at Southern New Hampshire University