Offering gratitude to be American

In response to my column a few weeks ago about Rep. Ilhan Omar’s egregious, meanspirited and graceless ingratitude for having been welcomed as a refugee into this country, reader Robert McLaughlin wrote an oped in which he criticized the suggestion that the Minnesota congresswoman owed any gratitude at all for the gift of citizenship.

Mr. McLaughlin’s defense of Omar exemplified a problem I see in our society, one that has increased as we wade deeper into Donald Trump’s presidency, and I’m actually glad he gave me the opportunity to address it.

Expecting people to be thankful for the good things that life has brought to them is normal, and the sign of a civil society. It is a hallmark of the type of values we used to treasure, in a country where people recognized that humility and gratitude are virtues, not weakness or abnegation.

Many Trump opponents point to his constant narcissism, the sense that he thinks so highly of himself that he can’t even consider the possibility of error in judgment or character. I absolutely agree with them that he is difficult to take, and that his constant tweeting about being “the biggest” or “the best” or “the smartest” or “the least racist” grates on the nerves. He is none of those things, and I suspect even he knows it.

I was also angry when Trump appeared to criticize the United States by suggesting, with his slogan “Make America Great Again” that it was somehow mediocre now.

Let me give you an example of it. The great black poet Langston Hughes wrote a poem that is searing in its honesty, its pain and its hope. In “Let America Be America Again,” Hughes pens these heartbreaking lines: O, yes,

I say it plain,

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath — America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,

The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,

We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

The mountains and the endless plain —

All, all the stretch of these great green states —

And make America again! (you can read the rest of the poem at this link: https://poets. org/poem/let-america-be-america-again)

The poet is criticizing a country where racism and poverty were rampant, and where injustice was a daily expectation for people who did not belong to the privileged classes. And yet, you can take from his masterpiece the sense that even though America has disappointed him, even though America is cracked and blurred around the edges, he believes that it can and will live up to the essential promise of her origins. And subtly, but powerfully, he communicates his love and gratitude for the “land, the mines, the plants, the rivers, the mountains and the endless plain” that should belong to him as much as to any man.

Langston Hughes was born in this country. Citizenship was his birthright. Ilhan Omar was airlifted out of a country that had devolved into anarchy, was given a home, an education, and endless opportunities for advancement. These things were not her birthright.

They were gifts given to her freely and with an open heart. That merits gratitude. Every immigrant I know is grateful, some to the point of tears when they take their oath of allegiance to the United States.

In the end, it really doesn’t matter much what Mr. McLaughlin or I think of Ilhan Omar. She is one of those politicians who will likely be long gone before the toxicity of her beliefs and her manner become a significant and lasting part of our national narrative.

What matters is that we learn to be grateful, again, for the ability to live in a country with potential for greatness. What matters is that we look at each other as Americans, flawed, angry, striving, fearful in the shadow of tragedy, resilient, and loving.

And instead of listening to the hateful rhetoric of a woman who despises those who have not lived her experience or walked in her shoes, let’s cling to the plea of Langston Hughes:

“O, let my land be a land where Liberty

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,

But opportunity is real, and life is free,

Equality is in the air we breathe.”