Dear "America Firsters" - April 17, 2021

Dear America Firsters of 2021,

You are not, any more than the previous “America First” folks, the “first” in “America.” Plenty of people preceded you.

That “America First” means, to you, “Anglo-Saxon,” reveals how many people in the United States whom you would like to ignore, or cause to disappear, in an instant, if you could. No question that it would not be good for the country or the economy.

So now we are into “Anglo-Saxon” first, really. Why don’t you call it that? I don’t want to be part of your Anglo-Saxon club, ever. In its past incarnation, “America First” prevented the possible chain migration of hundreds of thousands of people who could have enhanced our nation and culture. Instead, many of those potential citizens, relatives of people already present in the United States, died at the hands of the diabolical regime of the Third Reich, whom the American Firsters of the 1930s and 1940s refused to admit was an enemy that needed to be opposed at all costs. Fortunately, the America first isolationists did not win that argument.

You are purveyors of fear that people who don’t look like you might outnumber you someday. We are on that path, demographically, and some of us believe it would be a good thing to see those changes.

That is because we don’t need your narrow-minded hateful chauvinism and bigotry. It started as xenophobia that emerged at very beginnings of our country, and it is not something to revive. It is an approach that we must leave behind on the dust-heap of history so that we can truly grow closer to each other.

In the words of a major non-Anglo Saxon music poet: “Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand, for the times, they are a’changin’.”