Are We Great Yet?

There is something profoundly wrong here. We’re watching a nation that loves to call itself Christian slash social programs as eagerly as it shoves federal workers into unemployment lines, then struts its military might on the birthday of the President, a man who minted his own digital currency, hawks autographed Bibles, sells entry to this country for five million dollars a pop via a “gold card” stamped, of course, with his face. All while bragging aloud about a “golden dome” to keep us safe. We recite words about camels and needles, about how the wealthy struggle to enter heaven, then stand behind a man who flaunts excess like a crown. We nod along to “when you welcome the stranger, you welcome me,” yet deport children with cancer to countries they cannot remember. These imperatives were never meant to only be cosplayed on Sundays. They stand in stark, irreconcilable contrast to an appetite for wealth and self-exaltation that we now dress up and parade as “greatness,” while we tear out its moral root, as we seek primarily to increase it, with reckless abandon.

How exactly is this making us great?

We betray allies we once vowed to protect, brow-beat them publicly in the White House, and mock allies in leaked chat logs like high school bullies. We rattle sabers at Greenland, Panama, and Canada. We enact tariffs indiscriminately, even on deserted islands home only to penguins. We deport people without due process, detain legal residents, even detain citizens for the crime of looking too foreign. One decorated veteran, carrying a purple heart and a brain injury from our own war, now waits to be cast aside. So much for gratitude.

It staggers me (an atheist, but one who remembers scripture well enough to see its incompatibility with gold cards and golden domes) that the same neighbors who howled endlessly about tyranny over a cloth mask or a vaccine now cheer while masked agents drag families from the street, and their homes, deporting them without due process, and even detain a US Marshal in a courthouse for looking “illegal.” We once called that dictatorship. Now it is rebranded as “law and order.” Even if they do not cheer, their silence is little more than complicity.

Let’s not pretend we have forgotten who smeared feces on the walls of the Capitol when an election did not go their way. They waved the flag of a failed rebellion that marched for slavery, beat police officers with flagpoles, built actual gallows on the Capitol lawn, and still dare to stand on church steps posturing as the moral backbone of this nation …all while pardoned by the very man who watched it with folded arms, and insisted he absolutely could not deploy the National Guard without a governor’s request.

So, do we care about liberty, or just protecting the tribe at any cost? If this is greatness, then fear has replaced strength, cruelty has replaced courage, and blind loyalty has replaced earnest faith. It could only be more perfectly complete if he insisted we drape the Statue of Liberty in gold, replace her tablet with the gold card, and of course, get rid of all that liberal nonsense about sending us your wretched refuse, poor, or huddled masses …but, keep the golden door, naturally.

Commands like “welcome the stranger” and “whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me” were never mere suggestions sandwiched between hymns. They are the hinge upon which the entire Christian ethic swings …or snaps. They apply without borders, irrespective of citizenship, without exceptions convenient to whatever flag waves behind the steeple. They stand in judgment every time we brag about wealth and faith in the same breath while shoving the sick and desperate, or even just the stranger, back with a hearty thrust.

So, are we great yet?  A gold card, or golden dome means absolutely nothing if the golden-rule lies in ruins beneath it.  The only light on offer to the world now, is that of our reputation set ablaze, and some are content simply to gold-plate the ashes as if that effectively hides the incineration of what was within.  If we keep mistaking that light for greatness, we deserve the darkness that follows.