The Ming Report

HOLD UP THE LAMP

January 12, 2004 - “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” Those are words put in the mouth of the Statue of Liberty by Emma Lazarus in her celebratory poem, “The New Colossus.” At the close of the 19th Century those words gave voice to the spirit of a growing and vibrant democracy and embraced what for my generation was the very definition of the American Dream. Here, and only here, could that yearning for liberty be realized. Here, and only here, was it possible for the children of oppression learn to breathe free. We were the land of freedom, the land of opportunity.

In the years following WWII we again welcomed the wretched refuse into our community. In that wonderful bureaucratic mongrelization of the language we called them “displaced persons” or DPs for short. They came from Latvia, Lithuania, from Prague or from Poland; refugees from homelands torn by a devastating war and afflicted by the oppression of Soviet authoritarianism. Their children joined us in our classes and they learned from us not to be afraid while we learned from them how to curse in languages unfamiliar to our parents. They entered the Golden Door a half century after Emma wrote those words that appear on the plaque at the feet of the great lady.

Well, Emma, the river of time has flowed on another fifty years or so. The air is no longer so free to breathe. We have our own homeless and tempest tossed, persons displaced not by war and terror, but by technology and economic policy that exalts profits over people; wealth over commonwealth. The Golden Door is just ajar, cracked open enough to admit guest workers to be exploited; to labor and displace more Americans and, when spent, to be ejected lest they become a permanent burden to the wealthy.

The America, confident and hopeful of which you wrote has disappeared with its spirit into the mists of things that once were. It has been replaced by an America of greed and fear; its free air stifled by a perpetual drive to control, not serve, its people. The vast spectrum of color that once was American liberty has shrunk to a palette made up of only yellow and orange and red. Where politicians once spoke of hope for a better tomorrow, the leaders of this nation preach only of fear and terror and record our comings and goings in a database. The lamp, a beacon lighting the way to be free, has been replaced by an Orange searchlight seeking to spy out imagined assaults.

What once was can be again. America can again become what she once was, a land of hope; of opportunity; of confidence, but only if she resolves to be. It will be pathway that takes courage to travel because it requires us to permit the essence of America to overcome security purchased at the cost of liberty. It is America’s choice.