Back where we might belong
Please don’t ask me for suggestions on how to improve the NBA draft.
I don’t have any.
In fact, I couldn’t give two figs in a Newton about anything having to do with the NBA draft. I really just don’t care.
Which logically brings us to the matter of the appropriateness of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s choice of residence.
The President of the United States has said she should go back where she came from.
Just to make it clear, Ms. Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1981 and came to the United States – legally, I’ll be quick to add – with her family when she was 12-years-old. She is a naturalized United States’ citizen, and, in 2018, was elected to the Congress of the United States from Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District after serving in the Minnesota Legislature.
Now as any of us who paid attention in our junior high civics classes – or passed the exams required to become a naturalized citizen – being elected to public office generally involves a campaign in which the candidate points out things in our public life that he or she believes should be improved and lays out a vision of what those improvements should be.
Here’s where the problem arises. Pointing out that America isn’t perfect is, in the view of the President, as good as proof that the Congresswoman “hates America” and should avail herself of the next available flight to her erstwhile hometown.
Now, before unpacking that, let’s pause for a moment to refresh out recollection of the litany of unhappiness Mr. Trump routinely rolls out whenever the takes to the stump … his dissatisfaction with the course America has taken puts the “again” in Make America Great Again.
No doubt The Donald will stand by his critical assessment of trends, conditions and policy decisions as evidence of his concern and love of America; but if an immigrant, Muslim, woman of color dares to raise a critical voice…
“Send her back!”
After all, shouldn’t she be more grateful? How dare she say, “I arrived at the age of 12 and learned that I was the extreme other. I was black. I was Muslim. I also learned I was extremely poor ant that the classless America that my father talked about didn’t exist.”
Might I suggest she dared say it because it was true. That it still is true.
But also take note that upon realizing that truth, acknowledging that truth, she didn’t despair, didn’t give up on the ideal of America that brought her family from the ruins of war riven Mogadishu to embrace Minnesota Nice in Minneapolis. She’s spent her adult life striving to make her adopted country live up to the ideals it was founded upon – liberty, equality, opportunity, and respect for the rights and dignity of every human person … with no exceptions.
And if her observations make us, the native born and comfortable, uncomfortable, if they point to things we’d rather not see, take note of things we’d rather ignore, remind us of promises yet unfulfilled, tasks long undone, responsibilities shirked and rights ignored, we may want to think for a moment about where it is the chanting crowd would send her back to.
For us, Black Hawk Down is a movie. To her, it’s the old neighborhood. She knows first-hand what comes when the rule of law is abandoned. When politics becomes factions and civil discourse turns to civil war. She is aware as none of us can be that if it can happen in Somalia, if it can happen in Syria, Yemen, or Venezuala, it can happen here.
Here in the country she so manifestly cares about.
But only if we abandon our ideals, abandon her dream. In short, only if we let it.
And then we would truly “send her back. “