With the Indiana primaries just around the corner, I want to make a light jab at one of the prominent slogans making headway this presidential race.
As an anthropologist, I am going to appeal to the notion that we can never go back. Though anthropologists have studied groups of humans all over the world, and have often fantasized about a way of living before our modern era, the truth is, we can never go back.
As Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, once said, "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." That is to say, often we do not know where we are going as we push forward in the world, and only in hindsight can we understand the results of our actions. But we must push forward nonetheless, because it is the only way. We can only learn from the past, but we cannot dwell in it. We must move forward.
This is why we can never make America great again.
Setting aside all questions of if we ever were great to begin with, or if we still are, or if we ever will be, we can never be great again. We cannot rely on going back to how things were, because we do not live in that world anymore. And we also currently do not agree with how things were then either. We have progressed as a nation; we have progressed as a people.
We are made up of all kinds of people from many diverse backgrounds. Some have come here illegally, okay, we can work to address that, but there are also some who have come here under political asylum. And our nation likes to represent itself as one of the best in the world, do we not?
Some families have migrated years ago, and now have second, and third, and fourth generation Americans. Despite where they have come from, some of them still maintain their original cultural beliefs, and that is okay, is it not? Have we not founded ourselves upon a national identity of equality for all people?
If this is what we believe in, we do not have time for misogynist rhetoric. We do not have time for anti-Muslim rhetoric. We do not have time for xenophobic reactions. We do not have time for anything that expresses ideas that a community of persons is expendable. What was so great about America in the past if it contained all of these ideas?
We are a nation which touts ideals of inclusivity; we do not have time to expose the many ways we still operate out of exclusivity.
This is why we can never make America great again. This is why, when I look at the slogans of two of the current presidential candidates, putting aside who I support or do not support, I must say that the slogan “A Future to Believe In” is more promising and makes more sense than “Make America Great Again”.
“A Future to Believe In” represents the idea that we will take what we have learned from the past, and move forward through the present. "A Future to Believe In" means that we will take the current ideals of the people and build a society constructed around ideologies we want to see manifest in the future. "A Future to Believe In" means that we are going to abandon the romantic notion that America was at one time so great and strive to take it back to its old stomping ground. "A Future To Believe In" means that if there was anything in the past so great, we will bring it to the present and morph it to represent the now. We can’t ever go back, and many of us might not want to.
This article isn’t spouting one candidate over the other, or stating my preference for presidential material. I am simply tearing apart the phrases chosen by two people, and drafting my own conclusion to what these statements imply.
If misogyny made America so great, I don’t want it. If racism made America so great, I don’t want it. If fear of strangers made America so great, I don’t want it. If cultural exclusivism made America so great, I don’t want that either. I do believe in a future for the United States of America, but it isn’t a future made up of those principles. It isn't a future which leads us to the past.
