We Will Come Around

We are now in a low point in American history. But we survived Nixon, we survived George W. Bush. We will always survive. They can force us down, they can call the people protesting Nazis (Nazis!) the alt-left. They can force their god down our throats. They can ignore science. They can try to give tax breaks to the rich and leave roughly 15-20 million Americans without health insurance. They can try to pass draconian immigration laws in a country of immigrants. They can try to stop a woman’s right to choose or a gay couple’s right to marry.

Guess what? We always win in the end. The religious right, the alt-right, the Nazis, the climate deniers – they will end up in the dustbin of history, just like those that opposed the Civil Rights Act and the traitors that made up the Confederacy. Why? Because Americans, down deep, realize that in order for the truths of the Declaration to be “self-evident” and “unalienable,” they have to be true for EVERYONE. There was a time when blacks were slaves and Native Americans were slaughtered and women couldn’t vote and certain churches, mosques, and temples were not protected as promised and African-Americans were separate but not equal and gays and lesbians couldn’t marry. See, we as a country, we come around (often slowly). You may not like or agree with an idea or a law, and you have the absolute right to petition your lawmakers. But down deep, to love this country is to love the ideas it was founded upon. And, yes, some of our Founding Fathers were flawed men – but we are not here to speak of individual flaws. We are here to revel and rejoice in their ideas. To be an American is to look around and realize that that the people at work, in your neighborhood, at the mall, are different than you, yet the same. They are Americans, and they deserve the chance to fully understand what that means. The rights are for all or the rights are for none. There is no in between. Not here. Not ever.

Michael-Patrick Harrington
Ambler, Pennsylvania

From CNN.com:

DC’s Lincoln Memorial vandalized with spray-painted expletive
Miranda Green

By Miranda Green, CNN

Washington (CNN)The National Park Service is actively working to remove graffiti found spray-painted in red on a pillar of the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall early Tuesday morning.
The graffiti was discovered around 4:30 a.m. ET Tuesday and appears to say “[expletive] law,” according to a statement provided by NPS. NPS also found indecipherable graffiti in silver spray-painted over a map of the Smithsonian museums in another area of the National Mall.

Both sites of vandalism are already being actively cleaned up by a National Mall and Memorial Parks monument preservation crew. Cleanup will continue until all evidence of the graffiti is gone, according to the NPS statement. The United States Park Police is currently investigating the incident.

This is not the first time that national monuments in DC have been tampered with. In February, the World War II, DC War Memorial, Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial were all vandalized with conspiracy-filled graffiti.

The graffiti consisted of text written in sharpie or magic marker, officials said, and included the words “Jackie shot JFK” and a message related to the September 11 attacks, according to US Park Police spokesperson Sgt. Anna Rose.

Back in 2013, the statues of Abraham Lincoln inside the Lincoln Memorial and Joseph Henry, outside the headquarters of the Smithsonian Institution, were also vandalized with green paint