Para hoi anthropoi

As of late there has been a push to put the face of the late and former President Ronald Reagan on the $50.00. Now, if you have any sort of even rudimentary formal education in both economics and the recent history of the USA, you will most likely know that Reagan was not really all that great of a president. Unemployment rose, secret arms deals with Iran may have happened under his leadership, the gap between the rich and poor grew wider… the list goes on. Honestly, he is not so far from the mark of the rest of his fellow presidents.

We live in a nation that is undoubtedly the strongest in the world. We can blow up who we want, we can control who we want, if something becomes of particular interest to us, we can disobey whatever voluntary organizations we choose to be a part of and invade little Middle Eastern states. In the not so distant past, our government forced a group of native to walk across the nation to a plot of  land where they could be contained and not interfere with the better, more white people. In the not so distant past, hundreds of thousands of lives were vaporized in an instant, their lives eclipsed by the white flash of a big boy and his fat adult companion. In the not so distant past more than of 100,00 civilians died under the cold moniker “collateral damage”.

You see our presidents represent something. They are not just men and not just political leaders. Intermingled with their blood is the blood of more than 300 million other people. In the footsteps treads a nation of black, white, red, yellow, brown. This vast melting pot of a place is represented by this one man…

The feet of billions walk with the burdens of disease, hunger, poverty, violence. Their eyes, their souls, look to the dawning sun behind the rippling standard colored by red. white. blue. But to find what? To find that when they finally make it here they are deported to their old hovels. They find that their very presence is illegal. There is no sun, there is no standard.

Ink travels down a slender tube and coats a little ball as it rolls across a page. The speedy scrawling bears the weight of a name that is almost a religious figure. But is not just his hand writing, it is my hand, it is your hand, it is our hands. And with the final dot on the last “i” or the last curl on the last “a”, the bombs fall, the soldiers march, the buildings fall, the people cry. And I see it. I see their fear; I hear their pleas. My heart breaks, but I signed the page. I ask myself, ‘What has my American dream cost them?” “Was it ever a dream, or was it always a nightmare?”

I am often labeled as a liberal, and usually pejoratively so. I will agree, I do not think Republicans should rule the world. I do not think we should spend the majority of our budget on “defense” (assault). I do not think “trickle-down” economics works. But my liberal “family members” have gotten something wrong, as well. You see, in the wake of the push to have Reagan on a piece of money, I have read more hatred about one man than i have in a long time. I think we all miss the point. We fight fire with fire. After 100,000 years, we still have not learned that killing the ones of us we do not like does not work. But I want to go a step further. There was a radical Jewish teacher a long time ago that said that if you even hate a man you have killed him. I think he noticed something that we do not like to see. he noticed that murder is only a symptom of a deeper problem in this species. He saw that the lack of love was what would undo us. We have a terrible freedom. We can choose to do whatever we wish and we exercise that power. But I want to ask you, what if we did things a different way? What if we answered violence with nonviolence? What if you answered hate with love? What if? Sure, we might look like pansies, but just what if?

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