250

Ask Mr. India

Massachusetts, our new home, where it all began, is moving from community to community – Governor, Senators, Congress members, city and town officials – marking the 250 years since a handful of determined colonialists, alongside many Indigenous people, dared to set their faces against prevailing, seemingly overwhelming force, to claim the outrageous right to determine their own fate.

Newburyport, our new home, turned her fishing fleet into the tiny navy that challenged (largely unsuccessfully) the mighty English navy. She had her turn to celebrate her part, last week.

If you still have the sense of being part of the most outrageous civil experiment, challenging every norm the world assumed was divinely ordained, you would have felt goose bumps I did, on a drizzly day, as the makeshift soldiers marched past, waving to the cheering crowd, as if we had just won our freedom.

Will we? Again? As I absorb the horror of how Republican members of Congress propose to dismantle every piece of compassion that has been laboriously put in place on behalf of our most vulnerable fellows, I see a once legitimate political Party, sow the seeds of its destruction.

Take a look.

As the parade passed by, my son-in-law said, “Be sure to get a photo that shows the restaurant they’re going by.”

Paul Revere’s cardboard steeple replica, our national standard, and a drummer in tri-corner hat, march proudly by Mr. India’s restaurant.

Beneath the bluster and false bravado, of our present ersatz national government, lies nostalgia for a white, masculine country that never existed.

And that contradicts everything we claim for ourselves.

When our makeshift navy was overwhelmed by the English navy, the French sailed in on our behalf. Despite our having fought alongside the English and Native Americans against them barely 10 years earlier.

From the beginning we have been an amalgam of, not only different, but often conflicting interests.

The whole point of our experiment is to test whether a country made up of every race, language, opinion, the world has ever known, can be a nation.

Or must we revert, not only to some would-be nativism (if we can ever figure out which native), but to being ruled by those who have lucked into great wealth and power?

Within the next 15 months, we will turn aside from the cynicism and meanness, the demeaning of those unlucky to have fallen through the safety net, and reaffirm, albeit, no doubt, in some new iteration only now being born, to embrace again what we have dared call the American Dream.

Ask Mr. India.