About three weeks ago I read an article published in the local neighborhood newspaper, that gets delivered to every home (whether residents will read it or not.) It was written by a woman on behalf of the local Republican Women’s Club. In it she vented her rage about the “fraudulent election,” in the United States, how she was terrified that “Socialism” would take over this country. She said it was a “Call to arms” to “Take back our country!” The next day there was a paramilitary siege on the Capitol building in Washington D.C.

I will say I am not a registered Republican. I will also say that I have many colleagues who are registered Republicans. I don’t hear this kind of rhetoric from my friends. I found this letter deeply troubling! The land we inhabit that we call the United States of America does not belong to Republicans, Democrats or indeed even the United States government.

We all live here. Our elected governors make laws about how we are to live together on this land, the elected President either signs the laws or does not. The Supreme Court judges hear challenges to the laws and decide whether they are legal under the Constitution. European immigrants brought with them the concept of property ownership. They used it as a way of taking land for themselves and then fighting the native people to keep them from hunting or fishing there. Our European ancestors created businesses and sold parcels of this land for profit. But in the end, this country we now call the United States of America is a European system.

Before the Europeans came here, millions of other people lived here. They were here for over a thousand years before this “new world” was set upon by European conquerors. It was not a new world to the residents! Although the people living here then followed their food sources and moved around, they fought for resources with other tribal groups just the way that the first people have done in every land on earth. They never thought that the land belonged to anyone!

I am a descendant of both the native people who lived here and of the immigrants who came to stake their claim to this land, killing and decimating everyone and everything that stood in the way of what they considered their “right” to claim this land as their own. I am descended from slave owners who fought with the Confederate Army against the United States in the Civil War, and of people who fought in defense of the United States on behalf of the Union Army. I am about as American as I can be! My European ancestors came to this land in the 1700s, mixed and mingled with the native women and so started a new mix! And my Native American ancestors were here long before then.

Nobody can claim they own the United States of America! It is land that is populated by millions of people, and all of them came from immigrant families. Everyone migrated here from somewhere (even the native people who were here before the Europeans.) Some family lineages have been here far longer than others, but the government that we now live with has changed over and over again as boundaries have been fought over, and islands taken as our country’s territories.

I love this beautiful continent. It is my home land. For anyone to claim that this country only belongs to 1/2 of the voting population outrages me! I want this country to continue and to evolve in ways that will help us to live up to the aspiration in the Pledge of Allegiance “One nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”