TRYING TIMES FOR THE REPUBLIC 241 YEARS IN THE MAKING

American Tune

Lyrics by Paul Simon

Music by JS Bach

Many's the time I've been mistaken, and many times confused

And I've often felt forsaken, and certainly misused.

But it's all right, it's all right, I'm just weary to my bones

Still, you don't expect to be bright and Bon Vivant

So far away from home, so far away from home.

By Juan Montoya
The American Republic and its inhabitants have seen turmoil from its very inception. When the Pilgrim colonists landed on Plymouth Rock and left the Mayflower, they were a sect of religious believers that were not content (and not very well liked) in their native England.

Dissatisfied with their situation, they sailed off to the new English colony that would eventually become the United States. Interestingly, the sect also had its disillusioned members who splintered off and formed new states away from the core colony because they complained of...religious intolerance.

The lot of the Native American under these new settlers was not a good one. The natives were not immune to the Old World diseases, and those who didn't succumb to the pestilences of small pox and other contagious illnesses were driven from their lands or simply slaughtered to drive them away from the Christian settlements. A sort of low-level intensity war raged for years.

The goodwill extended the new comers by the naive natives at the first Thanksgiving that helped them survive in the Brave New world was badly repaid with a strange sort of return.

It would result, eventually, in the native populations being decimated, dispossessed of their ancestral homelands, and relegated to a system of dependence on their conquerors. If in New Spain it was encomiendas, in the United States it was reservations. What if the natives had had an immigration service to filter out the newcomers?

I don't know a soul who's not been battered

Don't have a friend who feels at ease

Don't know a dream that's not been shattered

Or driven to it's knees. 

But it's all right, all right, We've lived so well so long

Still, when I think of the road we're traveling on,

I wonder what went wrong, I can't help it

I wonder what went wrong.

By 1776, the 13 colonies had acquired their independence from Mother England and set about to establish a country rooted in the ideals embodied in the U.S. Constitution that still hold the nation together. It was the promise of freedom and equal justice for all.

The United States spread west and incorporated into it the masses of Europe, the tired, the hungry, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The young country soon contracted the dreaded European disease known as imperialism and spread its wings – as newspaper editor John O'Sullivan , the sloganeer, phrased it – to accomplish its "manifest destiny."

By 1848, having invaded and defeated the newly-independent and division-torn Mexican state and acquired more than half of its territory, it set about to settle and grab the great stretches of land west of the Mississippi and beyond the Continental Divide. Hungry European and Irish refugees looked across the ocean to a new beginning, for them, the American Dream.

They came by the millions, often to face a backlash by those who were already here. Even the Irish often found that in the lowest jobs, the statement "Irish Need Not Apply" was posted below the advertisement for workers.

And still, the nagging and lingering "peculiar institution" that relegated the black slave and his descendants to a life of servitude and second-class citizenship (remember the three-fifths Compromise?) continued to hang around the nation's conscience like an albatross. It would only be a matter of time before the festering sore would explode "like a raisin in the sun" and the matter was brought to the fore and faced squarely in a bloody Civil War between brothers.

It had to reconcile its comportment with its stated ideals, or, as one of the descendants of slaves, Barbara Jordan, so simply and eloquently stated: "What the people want is very simple – they want an America as good as its promise."

And I dreamed I was flying. I dreamed my soul rose

unexpectedly, and looking back down on me, smiled

reassuringly, and I dreamed I was dying.

And far above, my eyes could clearly see

The Statue of Liberty, drifting away to sea

And I dreamed I was flying.

Lately, it seems the Good Ship America doesn't want some of us anymore. In contrast to the laws of the past that actually sought out agreements with nations like China, Mexico and others to fill jobs no one – not even the descendants of the Irish – would take, it now seeks out those who appear different are now targeted for banishment from the realm.

The policies singling out those of the Muslim faith is but the latest manifestation of this all-too-American trait.

During wars and times when labor was needed, the trains and transports would stream to the border to load up with laborers only too glad to find any kind of work to feed their families back in their homelands. Chinese workers built – and died building – the railroads in the West. They literally watered the road to progress with their blood. The Germans and Scandinavians made the Great Plains fertile. The Irish provided the raw muscle for huge public projects in the East.

People like Albert Einstein, a Jewish scientist refugee fleeing the Nazi nightmare, helped us prevent a Third Reich. Countless other human beings cast out by want or the authoritarian regimes of their homelands migrated here and contributed their grain of sand.

Mexicans bent their backs to make the deserts green and gathered the minerals from the depths of dank, dark mines. During both world wars – and continuing up to now – the crops and food that feed us are harvested by them. 

And now, in the aftermath of the 911 tragedy and a continuing conflict in the Middle East combined with the global economic downturn, has antagonized us against each other.

Fences and walls are being built.

Deportations have began again.

And so we find ourselves like that first load of Pilgrims who unloaded their meager belongings at Plymouth agonizing over what kind of nation we want to be, what kind of people we want to become, what kind of future we want for our children. Will we forget the promise that was made back when?

Or can we soar higher?

We come on a ship we call the Mayflower,

We come on a ship that sailed the moon 

We come at the age's most uncertain hour

And sing the American tune

But it's all right, it's all right

You can't be forever blessed

Still, tomorrow's gonna be another working day

And I'm trying to get some rest,

That's all, I'm trying to get some rest