Bless us, every one
After Sept. 11, I began to see little posters in some classrooms around school, tacked to teachers’ walls and windows. The poster is nothing much, really. Just the American flag, all 13 stripes and 50 stars, and a simple message underneath: “God bless America.”
The message disturbs me more than I can say. And it’s not only on flags, but it’s on grocery bags, in store windows, car bumpers, t-shirts, in speeches, on magazines, and in hundreds of other places that are just waiting to have it embossed on the surface.
What are people reading into this message? Think about it for a second and imagine what it means. You could pick it apart and rewrite it. You could write it in a different language and ask the French what it means. You could write it upside down and stand on your head to read it. Any way you write it, it will mean different things to different people, and that is exactly my point: it doesn’t mean a thing.
God bless America. Why should God only bless America? Should not God bless the world, every nation, every person and every last bit of life on Earth? Or should God’s focus be entirely on American soil because, let’s just say it, Americans are better and every other country can eat our dust while we travel on the road to righteousness?
There is a word for what America is doing: elitism. The American Heritage Dictionary labels elitism as “the belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority as in intellect, social status, or financial resources.”
Elitism in history has always led to unpleasant outcomes. Hitler (murdered six million Jews) was an elitist. So was Columbus (slaughtered Native Americans). The British (remember India?), or the imperial Japanese (terrorized the Chinese). I’m not saying that America is preparing to wage genocidal war on the world, but I do think that we need to put our slogan in check.
Castro Valley is an okay place: I’ve never been mugged or beat up or scared to walk home. But some places in the world are horrifying and they make Castro Valley look like paradise. God needs to bless those places. America needs to stop hogging Him and start letting Him bless everything and America needs to know that.
I think that Charles Dickens realized this when he wrote a story in which a wise young crippled boy with a crutch said at the Christmas dinner table, “Bless us. Every one.”
Sharing the talent of our alumni, The Olympian presents classic stories from its archive, including this article first published on March 29, 2002.