Love the World, America, or Leave It

As the early shock waves from the great earthquake known as the 2016 United States presidential election subside and the world now braces itself for the resulting tsunami waves to follow, it is a good moment for us all to pause and do what the USA, in particular, has always been very poor at doing throughout its history as a young nation: self-reflection.

It is not part of the American collective psyche to spend much time looking back on the past, reflecting on big mistakes, and then, having learned from those mistakes, to move on to a brighter future. No, the emphasis has always been on right now, grabbing and snatching all it can get its hands on as a society, with little thought of either yesterday or tomorrow. But that will all have to change, now that a billionaire businessman with a neo-fascist agenda is set to be sworn in and addressed by all U.S. citizens, whether they like it or not, as “Mr. President”.

What led the USA to this ignominious place it stands at today? Was it the European trans-Atlantic slave trade of the 1500s onward in which millions of human beings were shipped in chains from the continent of Africa, the cradle and apex of human civilization, and brought to a “New World” to build an economy from the ground up? Or was it the systematic slaughter of millions of indigenous First Nations people who had lived on the continent known as Turtle Island tens of thousands of years before the word “America” was ever uttered by those European invaders?

Or could it have been the concept of “manifest destiny”, a theory of divine providence that was first made popular not by some politician but by an American journalist named John O’Sullivan, much later in the mid-1800s, to justify the mass rape and theft of other peoples’ lands across the North American continent and beyond? Or was it the ensuing destruction of foreign lands, wars, genocide, more wars, mass accumulation of wealth, still more wars, slave labor, hyper-productive industries, permanent environmental pollution, and yet more wars — all done over the course of centuries, up to the present day, with the blessing of the god Greed?

Whatever it was that spurred you along, you’re now at that place, America, and you’re in deep trouble. And the worst part of it is that due to the global influence and reach of your tentacles of politics, economics and culture, the whole world will have to suffer along with you.

America — Love It or Leave It was a common slogan heard in U.S. society especially around the time of the USA’s war on the sovereign Southeast Asian nation of Vietnam back in the 1960s and 1970s. This slogan was found everywhere, from bumper stickers of cars to neighborhood graffiti to placards of pro-war demonstrators in the United States. “Love it or leave it” dripped from people’s lips in the media at the time. The words seemed to be everywhere.

And some Americans took that advice, literally. Canada was the first choice of escape for many young people who refused to go and kill some innocent brown-skinned people across the ocean just because their corrupt government in Washington DC told them to. During that time, a number of American military personnel stationed on U.S. bases here in Japan deserted their ranks and were secretly smuggled out of Japan and on to Europe with the help of a grassroots network of sympathetic Japanese antiwar activists. Americans, when given a choice of loving it or leaving it, will often choose the latter.

And that choice, ironically, now comes back to haunt you as a society, America, decades later as you prepare to swear in a Wall Street real estate mogul by the name of Donald J. Trump (a.k.a. The Muskrat) as your 45th president in just a couple more months.

Love this world or leave it, America. There are more than 200 countries and independent territories on this planet, of which you are only one. You are superior to no one, and if the truth be known, you are inferior in many ways to other nations when it comes to taking care of their own people and nurturing peaceful relations between countries. You are not God, America, and never were. “Manifest destiny” was the Great White Lie that was buried long ago. The seven billion people on Planet Earth will need to survive together, and the times call for us all as a human species to stop and go in a different direction now that we see the Earth, our common mother, crumbling at the seams at a time of massive environmental change.

Love the world or leave it. We hope you choose the former, America, but if the latter is your choice due to your sense of adolescent self-centeredness and arrogance, then please make sure you leave as far away from here as you can go. Have your NASA scientists find a way to send all those selfish U.S. citizens who refuse to get along peacefully with the rest of world’s people into a gigantic space station outside the Earth’s orbit, and then get lost somewhere out there in the Final Frontier. If you just can’t love this world in all its diversity, and if you can’t act responsibly and respectfully among the international community of nations on this beautiful planet, then sorry, you’ll have to leave.

We’re sure you can understand what we mean when we say Love the world or leave it. You are the Land of Two Choices after all, right? It’s either Coke or Pepsi. Coors or Budweiser. Ford or Chevy. Democrat or Republican. Communism or capitalism. Guilty or innocent. For the terrorists or against the terrorists. Support the war or shut up. Life or death.

Self-reflect or die: That is the urgent challenge before you now, America. It goes against all your materialistic instincts to collectively reflect on yourself and your past mistakes, but that is exactly what you need to do now. And once you’ve reflected deeply enough and taken a good, hard look in that mirror that’s before you, then you need to quickly shift into resistance mode and stop this dangerous incoming president and all the vile things he stands for at every single opportunity. Trip up Trump. And do it well.

If you ask me, America, you’re damn lucky that there are still enough honest, hard-working, good-hearted citizens left within your borders who are willing to fight for your soul and for what little bit of dignity you’ve got left as a nation, considering all the unforgivable things you’ve done to your own people and others around the world over the past few hundred years. But fight they must now, and if there was ever a nonviolent Good Fight to be fought for the sake of the survival of the whole world as we know it, then this one is it.

We’re all in this thing called Life together. Love the world or leave it. Reflect deeply on that, America, then get right to work on helping to save the globe from this holy mess you’ve created. It’s either that, or we bid you farewell into the vast cosmos. And you know there won’t be too many extra-terrestrial beings up there in outer space who are glad to see you, either.

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