“Make America Great Again” has struck a chord with many
people. It implies that America’s influence is fading and is past its prime.
According to the Huffington Post, making America great means “silences immigrant
experiences, shames women, and marginalizes people of color.” This may or may
not be true, we will have to wait until Trump is inaugurated and has served his
first hundred days in order to get a glimpse of the next forty-five months.
America may still be that
“a city upon a hill” that John Winthrop speaks of, but the erosion of the hill which started with our pull out of Vietnam, the lingering war in Korea which won’t quit, our invasions of Iraq and America’s longest war yet in Afghanistan, our proxy war in Syria battling ISIS and possibly Al Qaeda is accelerating and the world is taking notice.
“a city upon a hill” that John Winthrop speaks of, but the erosion of the hill which started with our pull out of Vietnam, the lingering war in Korea which won’t quit, our invasions of Iraq and America’s longest war yet in Afghanistan, our proxy war in Syria battling ISIS and possibly Al Qaeda is accelerating and the world is taking notice.
Trump’s ‘Making America Great Again’ doesn’t refer to
incarceration rates; America leads the world in incarceration by a long shot.
It also doesn’t mean ‘Making America Great Again’ in defense spending. America’s
defense spending surpasses the next seven country’s (China, Saudi Arabia,
Russia, the UK, India, France, and Japan) combined total spending for defense;
the US spends just under $600 Billion verses just under $570 Billion for the
next seven countries.
By making America ‘great again,’ he could mean raising
America’s rankings in the world in categories such as literacy and human
rights. The US is 14th in education, third in global competitiveness, 101st
in peace, 13th in acceptance of homosexuals, 23rd in
gender equality, 46th in freedom of the press, and 24th
in literacy. ‘Making America Great Again’ is a topic which is very subjective
and is up for anybody’s guess; only Trump really knows what it means.
The real meaning of ‘Make America Great Again’ may lie in Trump’s
mind for all of us to ponder but in 1992 when Bill Clinton was running for the
office of the Presidency, he used the same slogan: ‘Make America Great Again.’
While helping his wife Hillary run for the office of the
Presidency, Bill told her surrogates exactly what it means to ‘Make America
Great Again,’
“If you’re a white southerner,” Clinton said, “you know exactly what it means, don’t you? It means I’ll give you the economy you had 50 years ago and I’ll move you back up the social totem pole and other people down.”
We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that (although there may
be a grain of truth to Trump’s definition if we examine and scrutinize his selectees
for his White House staff) that Bill [and Hillary] Clinton’s definition has
racist undertones just by the legislation passed during his terms as president.
All one needs to do is to examine the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement
Act of 1994 to see how this bill effects the African Americans in America.
In a speech at an NAACP convention in Philadelphia in July, Clinton
acknowledged that tougher incarceration provisions in the [Violent Crime Control
and Law Enforcement Act of 1994] bill were a mistake. “I signed a
bill that made the problem worse,” Clinton said. “And I want to admit it.”