Love It or Leave It!

Back in the late 60’s when I was coming of age and questioning “the Establishment,” “love it or leave it” was the mantra of the far Right (which was wrong). “Why don’t you go to Russia?” they shouted at the people protesting, equating our citizen’s duty to question with an act of hating our country. 

Now a half-century later, I say to the Repugnaticans the same: “Love it or leave it!“

Because their words and their actions show so clearly that they don’t love it, indeed, are traitors to the country’s founding principles. Consider: 

• They don’t love the people that worked to make us what we are. The workers that physically built the economy through hard labor, much of it unpaid or underpaid. And still today, the people that pick the fruit, clean the houses, work in the factories, build the roads and so on. 

• They don’t love the civil rights workers and the social activists who edge us closer to actually realizing the vision of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

•  They don’t love the Constitution itself except when it protects their unearned privilege.

• They don’t love the law, looking for their sneaky ways to suppress votes, skew the elections, hide money offshore, publicly lie and use influence to avoid consequence.

• They don’t love the land, the national parks, the farms, selling our precious natural resources down the polluted river so they can drive to Walmart in their SUV’s. 

• They don’t love the schools and the hard-working teachers who teach their children and certainly don’t care about the children themselves as they threaten their future with purposeful ignorance about climate change. 

• They don’t love freedom of the press, led by their “fake-news” so-called leader.

• They don’t love the Statue of Liberty, doing everything they can to turn away those huddled masses unless they happen to be a model from Slovenia who breaks all the rules to get in. 

And so on. 

As for Russia, they too, might as well go there since that’s how they won the election.

Love it or leave it, people and leave the rest of us patriots to complete the work the Founding Fathers didn’t get to.