Don't Settle for a MAGA America.
Sunday, July 13, 2025:
Rather than writing a new post, today I’m reprinting something of mine that appeared in the Detroit Free Press this past week. In it, I took exception to a Free Press columnist’s recommendation that Americans feel gratitude this July 4th even if we cannot take pride in what our government is doing.
I was pleased that the paper’s management allowed me more than the 150 words that is their normal maximum for letters to the editor. I was, however, much less pleased that the paper’s management felt compelled to change two of my words. As a result, the “concentration camps” to which I referred in my first bullet point as-written were downgraded to “detention centers” in my piece as-published.
Detroit Free Press
July 11, 2025
Albom settles for the status quo. I won't.
Mitch Albom's suggestion that Americans feel gratitude for America this July 4 even if we cannot take pride in what is being done in our name is dangerous nonsense.
Gratitude breeds complacency, and increases the likelihood that people will settle for the status quo. And to do that now would have us settle for an America that:
Rounds-up migrants and constructs detention centers to hold them.
Strives to make the lives of our most vulnerable people worse rather than better.
Transfers our collective wealth upward rather than outward.
More highly protects the sensibilities of white Christians than the rights of all.
Denies science and is accelerating, rather than reducing, our environmental impact.
Abdicates our global responsibilities.
Denies and is working to erase the contributions of women, people of color and the LGBTQ+ community from our history.
Restored the names of slave-owning traitors to major military facilities.
No, actually, forming that "more perfect union" to which the founding generation committed us has always been better served by ingratitude than gratitude, and that has never been more true than at this time of unprecedented challenges to the American experiment.
Michael Montgomery