The American Apartheid

Nadine Gordimer, a South African, wrote a great story about Apartheid: “Once Upon a Time”. The residents in the story invest heavily in walling themselves off from any potential harm. They fail to see, until the end, that they are actually walling themselves in.
Today, some Americans are attempting to create a bastardized version of Apartheid. They are resentful when we call them racists and homophobes. They want their racial purity and their homophobia, but they also want to convince the rest of us that their motives are somehow benign. “What’s wrong with a society of racial barriers,” they say! “Segregation worked pretty well in the past and can work even better in the future,” they say! “Homosexuality is an offense to God,” they say. “We want the traditional values,” they say. They say these things even though multi-ethnicity and homosexuality have always been with us and are not going away. I say that Live and Let Live is the only traditional value that matters.
Lately, they have been asking, “How come they get all the advantages and the special treatment? What about me?” They whine so much. It reminds me of very small children.
Make America Great Again is coded language, and we all know what the coded message is. “Let’s make sure that our people, people like us, are always firmly in power and exercising full control. They would deny it, but what they don’t publicly acknowledge is the unintended consequences of the life they want us all to live: the inevitable creation of second-class citizenry, which is unacceptable in the kind of Democracy we are striving to build for ourselves.
Hey MAGA! We’ll give you stricter voter registration and more respect for the laws. But, you have mentally created a secondary class of citizenship for non-white immigrants and homosexuals. The rest of us reject the rules and policies you would use to bolster that ideology. Think again! Equal opportunity remains our primary goal and our highest value. There will be no American Apartheid! We remain, and shall remain, a pluralistic society.
Still, we owe you a debt for whatever service you have provided this great county when not trying to divide it into warring camps. So if you cannot live with America as it is, and as it will be, I suggest you change your name to MNAG (Make a New America Great). Find some new place for your misplaced racial and sexual animosity. I suggest Madagascar! Or, if Madagascar’s indigenous Malagasy peoples prove unpalatable to you, find some other agreeable locale. I am sure a more insightful American government of the not-too-distant future will provide incentives for such a move. We want to pay for your passages, because, frankly, we’re tired of listening to your pointless whining.