Will Wright, HuffPo: "New Year's Wish: Getting My Country Back"

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Will Wright
Veteran journalist
Posted: December 29, 2009 09:28 AM

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-wright/new-years-wish-getting-my_b_405900.html

Of all the things I want most in the new year, getting my country back tops everything. No, not the way those who want to turn the clock back to when the president wasn't a black man with foreign lineage and an agenda they see as "not American."

What I yearn for is when my country was, in fact, a beacon for democracy, for high principles and ideals. When the elected president was seen to be, and widely accepted to be, president of all Americans. When the party not in power not only did not want the president to fail, did not work for him to fail, but wanted him to succeed for the benefit of the country. When fomenting hatred of the president was not only un-American, but uncool.

During the Great Depression and the global war that followed, my father took great pride in being at once a staunch Republican and a strong supporter of the president, who happened to be a Democrat. My father did not see any contradiction. The country was beset with dire economic problems, as it is now, and we faced implacable enemies, as we do now. In such circumstances, my father would say, we are Americans first, party members second, and the president deserved our support. Not a blank check, but also not knee-jerk opposition just for the sake of it.

Back then, and in the years that followed before the dawn of polarized politics, facts mattered more than willful ignorance. They mattered more than the fear and fiction purveyed today in the name of defending American freedoms and values. Civility in debating the issues of the times was preferred over today's tendency to attack loudly, often in the key of nasty.