sweet land

This morning my radio alarm blared the static-fused voices of the in-between. Not really on a station, but blaring, nonetheless. I reached over to turn down the volume and adjust to my station, but without my glasses couldn't see if I was going the right direction.

Finally landed on a station and a preacher was preaching and his words revealed his fear that in 30 years, this country would no longer be a Christian nation but a Muslim nation. Unless things changed. Good God! I changed the station (to my liberal public radio) then turned off the alarm.

It hurts my ears, and something much deeper inside me, to listen to the hatred coming over the airwaves. And it saddens me to think of all the listeners who follow, all the children who are taught this by their families and their churches. It saddens me to think that so many people want this to be a land that is not inclusive. Because there is always a group, it seems that people turn upon to hate. When it is a professed Christian preaching the hatred, it is pure frustration.

My ancestors, like most Americans, were immigrants. They were from Europe, though the rumor of the "Arabian" man who climbed into the family tree has always intrigued me. And reminded me that we don't always know who's back there even if we have tried to figure it out through Ancestry.com. Because not all of it is written down. So, besides the mysterious man, there's some German, some English, some Irish, Scottish. People who didn't always get along. People of different faiths (yes, both my grandmothers were Catholics married to Protestants, gasp!)

I wish people would stop hating each other, stop teaching hatred, and come together to solve our country's actual problems and lend a hand across the globe. We are a nation of people of diverse backgrounds. People have freedom to practice their faith, whatever that may be. We even have the freedom to not practice any faith. And that doesn't make any one of us less deserving, less American. Isn't that what makes us the US? United in our liberties?

 We all remember these words from The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus:
...Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

How about these?
...
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome;


I don't often get into this kind of subject, but it bothered me & I thought I'd better say something about it. I guess I just want my fellow Americans to behave like decent human beings.