With the Independence Day holiday upon us, we will undoubtedly see
numerous columns about patriotism, the cost of freedom and the like. It reminds
me of an incident from over 40 years ago on a beach in El Salvador through
which I saw a different view of America, courtesy of a Salvadoran college
student.
It was Semana Santa, Easter
week and a group of us, Peace Corps volunteers had gathered at the beach where
we were sitting in the sand with the gentle surf lapping at our toes. There
were five of us, from Missouri, Kansas, New York, Connecticut, and California
and without anyone saying a word, five sets of hands began digging,
constructing a sand castle. One of the fellows worked at the national
university in the capital city of San Salvador and he had brought a couple of
his university students with him. As one of them watched us, he spoke up.
“This is something I do not understand about Americans. No one said, ‘let
us build a sand castle’ and yet each of you knew immediately what the others
were doing and joined in. My country is much smaller than yours, only 160 miles
one end to the other. I come from the capital, a little over 100 miles from here
but if I sat down and began to dig in the sand, these local fishermen would not
know what I was doing and certainly would not come to join me. How do you do
that?”
That gave each of us something to think about for several moments
before we could formulate an answer to such an intriguing question. After much
discussion, we decided it was a combination of America’s public education system—we
all grew up reading about Dick and Jane and Spot, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys—and
television programs, from Howdy Doody to Romper Room to Mighty Mouse, The Lone Ranger, and Leave It To Beaver. No
matter what part of the country we grew up in, that was our childhood and it
gave us a number of common denominators.
It was an answer we could all agree on and one that seemed to satisfy
the student who posed the original question. He went on to share with us that
although he and his countrymen lived much closer to each other geographically,
they did not share the same educational advantages—many of the poorer fishermen
had little or no formal schooling and certainly didn’t have access to
television as children. At that time in the 1970s, I lived in that fishing
village. There were only three known televisions in the entire town and one
of them was in a well-known combination bar and brothel!
It is food for thought in terms of what has united us and continues to
make America work as a country. There are more countries in the world that struggle
with the issues that have long plagued tiny El Salvador, divergent
populations with educational levels that cover the entire spectrum and/or with
different cultures and languages, such as indigenous populations, dialects vs.
a dominant national language. Likewise, there are only a handful of countries
with the geographical span and physical resources that have blessed America and
still, we have managed to hold it all together for over 200 years.
The question now as we face an uncertain political future and an
increasingly bitter campaign, is how do we continue to do so? The answer is to
watch and listen carefully. What exactly are these two campaigns actually
marketing? We may not be in love with either of the major candidates but in listening
to the campaigns, I hear one in particular marketing hate, just one step
down from a now infamous campaign in Europe in the 1930s. Back then, the man at
the center of that firestorm, concentrated on one particular ethnic group,
blaming much of their country’s financial troubles on the businesses, the men involved
and their entire families. Today, Donald
Trump is blaming various groups—ethnic, religious, and racial—for America’s
problems as well as women in general. He may be spreading the blame around, but
his promotional strategy is still the same as Adolf Hitler’s. Do we really want
to put someone in the White House who blames everyone else, particularly entire
ethnic, religious or gender groups, for the problems we face? History has shown
us the results of campaigns built on hate, from Herod to Hitler, and they have
always brought nothing but misery and heartbreak for all.
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