For months I’ve been saying that if Donald Trump becomes President, we should tear down the Statue of Liberty and send it back to France. One person I mentioned this to replied, “It’s just art.”
But is it ‘just art?’ The first view of America that thousands of immigrants is was the Statue of the Lady in the harbor. Whether or not this is an official icon of our country, the Statue of Liberty has become a symbol of freedom across the world. In less than three weeks, the significance of this image will be forever changed.
From the Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lorraine-devon-wilke/our-task-in-2017-be-bette_b_13913238.html
…while [we have] a tragic and dispiriting legacy of Election 2016, we are each and every one of us capable of transcending and resisting it. How?
By being better Americans than the incoming president:
- By being better people, better leaders; better teachers, mentors, inspirers, and creators, embodying exactly the kind of people we want our children to be.
- By being industry leaders and innovators who conduct business with respect, integrity, and unassailable ethics.
- By opening our minds and hearts to learn and absorb new facts and verified truths — not propaganda, not biased misinformation — about people, cultures, ethnicities, religions, and orientations that are “different” and unfamiliar.
- By extending the compassion and understanding garnered from the above to treat people better, to seek new ways to help, find effective steps toward tangible solutions.
- By shaking off fixed notions about what sexism is, gaining greater understanding of how it pervades and influences; adjusting our thinking to realize and implement respectful, honorable, and gender-equality behaviors and attitudes towards women.
- By teaching and exemplifying decorous, respectful, civil, and productive discussion skills, for both virtual and tangible conversation and debate. Trollism has had a deleterious effect on our culture and, unfortunately, the new president is the King of Trolls. Let’s change the trend and raise the bar.
- By realizing that “politically correct” actually means being sensitive and aware of evolving culture, mores, ideas, and attitudes, and adjusting according. That rejecting the notion of “politically correct” is most often the tool of those who traffick in bigotry, hate, racism, sexism, trollism, and verbal abuse.
- By understanding that loyalty and patriotism do not require blind acceptance of the words, actions, and policies of any one person, including the new president, nor do they preempt one’s right to free speech and civil liberty. They do, however, suggest one not aggrandize the dictator of an antagonistic foreign government over one’s own.
- And, lastly, and in an umbrella overview: by acknowledging and staying vigilant to the new president’s long and growing list of negatives, using those as bullet-points of what not to be, do, and emulate. That almost makes it easy, doesn’t it?
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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 