Immokalee, Florida, is one of the more unlikely places on the planet where one might expect to have a soul-impacting experience; but that’s just what happened to me on Tuesday of this week. As I was standing in the second row from the fence separating the waiting crowd from the speaking area set up for the feature attraction—a campaign speech by Hillary Clinton’s number-one surrogate, former President Bill Clinton—my feet were firmly planted on the spot of soil which I had claimed to place me in a prime spot for at least a handshake and hopefully a selfie after the speech. Alas, only the first row got selfies, but I did succeed in getting the treasured handshake. While I was waiting for the event to begin, my eyes scanning the growing crowd, the gentleman behind me suddenly voiced the thoughts that were spinning in my mind: “LOOK at the diversity in this crowd!”
Indeed, it would be almost impossible to conjure in your mind the diverse group gathered there. For those unfamiliar with the Florida map, Immokalee is just under an hour’s drive from Fort Myers; it’s an agricultural community east of Naples. Both carved out of the Florida Everglades, and both in Collier County, the differences between Naples and Immokalee could not be more stark. Naples is the Palm Beach/Grosse Pointe/Hamptons of Southwest Florida. Many homes in downtown Naples could cover football fields, and there’s that “certain something” about the people one meets there on the streets.
Immokalee, on the other hand, is an unincorporated community, belonging to the Naples-Marco Island Statistical Area. It is home to a large migrant population: farm workers and produce pickers, whose main crop is tomatoes. The poverty and human rights abuses have for decades been the subject of documentaries and calls for change.
Since Collier County sits on the edge of the Florida Everglades, the county also remains the home of some Seminole Indians, who were forced to move south during the Seminole Wars in northern Florida during the early 1800s. Thanks to the Seminoles, Immokalee is not without its bright spots, especially the large Seminole Casino where people from all of South Florida enjoy gambling and dancing.
There in the middle of the Roberts Ranch, all of those wildly diverse populations were represented in what almost felt like a scene out of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” But instead of highlighting the dark heart of human nature as in Hawthorne’s fiction, this gathering highlighted the very best, most enlightened impulses of our common humanity: love and respect unbounded by skin color, race, age, or socio-economic status. With one voice, Naples elites, Immokalee farm workers, local politicians, old people, young people, black people, brown people, red people (Seminoles), and white people peacefully chanted “I’m with her!”
When President Clinton appeared, he seemed every bit as much at ease on a makeshift stage at the Roberts Ranch as he would have been at a white-tie dinner with high-rolling donors. He spoke lovingly and kindly to the audience, making every individual feel the same warmth and good humor as if he were speaking only to them.
He spoke with great knowledge and command of fact on the economy, health care, gun concerns, and other issues of significance to all; but his central theme was something even more important. He said he began this campaign expecting a “normal” scenario of two candidates stating their different views on issues and choices facing Americans; but as the campaign progressed, he said, he became increasingly aware that this campaign was going to be about far more than issues and choices. It was going to boil down to what it means to be an American.
Simple yet profound, that phrase—“what it means to be an American”—has occupied my thoughts these last few days. And here’s what I’ve decided: To me, being an American means living life on the Roberts Ranch. Oh, not literally, of course. I like my creature comforts too much, and I have no desire to start picking tomatoes. But I’d like to see that gathering become a microcosm of our country at large. Yeah, that’s idealistic, and that kind of goal will never be fully realized; but here are some things which I think are doable and which I think we must do if we are to reverse the damaging legacy of 2016.
The subculture which has found legitimacy and a public voice through the Trump campaign must be sent back to the underbelly where it belongs. According to an investigative report by Luke O’Brien (http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/alt-right/), the alt-right movement was only a loosely connected group of white supremacists and violent Neo-Nazis until Trump came along and saw a chance to latch onto a strong support group. Thanks to Trump, Steve Bannon, and the communication technology of Breitbart, this group has now infected the mainstream and has been emboldened to pursue their twisted dream of forming white ethno-states. They have even identified their “next David Duke,” a 25-year-old man named Matthew Heimbach who aims to lead the group forward toward a “future of organized hate.”
Sadly, racism is written into America’s DNA: the kidnapped Africans were here before the Pilgrims, and the white Europeans’ (from whom most of us are descended) genocide of the Native Americans is a national disgrace. But those better parts of our nature had gone a long way toward rectifying our original sins until this ugly uprising. We all have to be the people we want our fellow Americans to emulate. More than ever, being an American means being informed. We no longer have the luxury of living with our heads in the sand and assuming smart people will lead us in ways of righteousness. We must accept the responsibility of being part of the solution.
Americans of the present and the future have to heed the advice of President John F. Kennedy:
Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.
Party loyalty must give way to a vision for the common good. The last decade has demonstrated the dire consequences of fierce party loyalty: obsession with obstructing our president has become the driving force behind every decision in Congress, rather than accepting the mandate of constituents who elected those representatives to legislate solutions to problems facing everyday citizens. Millions of the people voting to elect a demagogue as president are doing so simply because he is the nominee of their party. That doesn’t work any more! Better for your party to lose the White House, the Senate, and the House than for all of us to lose our country! Unlike Trump’s bigoted “America first” mantra, we need to be Americans first.
More than anything else, having a Roberts Ranch culture requires all of us to look around us and truly believe that we are stronger together—not just repeat it as a catchy campaign slogan, but really internalize the fact that cracks and divisions weaken any vessel. The glue that can keep us all in one piece is love and compassion, not hate and desire to conquer and destroy. We don’t need any more David Dukes! We need some more Martin Luther Kings who believe
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. The chain reaction of evil –hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars –must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
John Winthrop, one of the leaders in the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its governor for 12 of the first 20 years of its existence, said in 1630:
For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our god in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world . . .
Now 386 years later, the eyes of the whole world are still upon us; and what they’re seeing is pretty embarrassing some days. They’re seeing an emotional toddler impersonating a presidential candidate, they’re seeing huge rallies where angry people spew hatred for our democracy, they’re hearing angry white people calling for the incarceration of their leader’s political opponent, they’re hearing a “presidential candidate” threaten his opponent with investigation and incarceration if he wins the high office, they’re seeing the rise of a subculture that could destroy everything the last 386 years has established, and they’ve heard a candidate threaten not to accept the voters’ decision in a major election. In other words, the whole world is seeing the United States of America do the unthinkable: give serious consideration to electing a demagogue who has no respect for our history and our institutions.
Winthrop warned, “We could become a story and a byword through the world.” In today’s language, that means “We could make asses of ourselves in front of the whole f&^%ing world. Is THAT what we want?” Of course, none of us wants that, but some are hell bent on trying to make it happen. And not only do we make ourselves look foolish, but we jeopardize all of those other countries whose security is at least partially dependent on our not losing our minds.
The government our founders envisioned was a great experiment that was supposed to determine whether humans could live as equals and be trusted to govern themselves, to prove that we didn’t need a monarch. Every now and then, we have to stop and ask ourselves the question, “So, how’s that working out for us?” Abraham Lincoln did a reality check in his Gettysburg Address:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
And today we’re in another civil conflict of sorts; we’re facing another test. Can our system work in the long term? Can we be trusted to elect smart, capable leaders? Can our two-party system function for the good of all? Can we maintain the peaceful transfer of power on which we’ve always prided ourselves? Can we get along with each other even when we disagree? Can we let the better parts of our nature dictate our actions and choices, or will we live by our base instincts?
We ARE stronger together. Do you want to live in a perpetual Trump rally, or would you rather live on Roberts Ranch? I’m voting for Roberts Ranch: love, peace, equality, and cooperation. Please join me!