Americans should stop demonizing each other and appreciate our differences

A Texas organization that honors service members at their funerals reportedly suffered a blow this week after they found they’d been robbed of dozens of American flags. (istock)

Americans are bitterly divided on many issues today, creating a poisonous atmosphere filled with charges and countercharges. We have weaponized social media to question the patriotism, honesty and morality of one another. We argue incessantly about all sorts of things. There seems little consensus on anything.

Sadly, many of us seem to have forgotten that our strength lies in our differences – and our ability to see beyond those differences to our similarities and appreciate the ties that bind us together as “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” as the Pledge of Allegiance so beautifully states.

And we have forgotten the motto developed for the first Great Seal of the United States in 1776 – created to make the point that the 13 British colonies rebelling against their colonial master were now the United States of America. The motto: the Latin phrase e pluribus unum. It translates to “out of many, one.”

E pluribus unum is inscribed on our currency. And today it signifies not just the unity of our 50 states, but the unity of our nation of immigrants – people from every ethnic, racial and religious background imaginable. People with great diversity of thoughts and beliefs.

We are different – yet we are one.

The wonder of the “out of many, one” motto was instilled in me very early in my life as the son of immigrants. My parents were born in Italy, immigrated to America in the 1930s and never went back.

My paternal grandparents lived with us as well, reinforcing the appreciation of my roots and their perspectives of the privilege of being Americans. Those two sentiments were never held in tension in my family. They represented the two sides of a coin of the strength of our nation.

My father was 16 when he came to the United States. He had vivid memories of growing up in Italy, living in a small mountain town in Calabria in clear sight of the sea. He would tell me about his idyllic life as a child, especially during the summer months, when he and friends would walk down the mountain and spend several days at the beach without coming home.

My father would take some salami and cheese from the cellar, catch fish in the sea, and sleep under the stars on the beach. Members of his family were self-sufficient because they grew or raised everything they needed. It was their version of Mayberry.

It sounded so good.

But then my father would tell me stories of how hard it was in the winter when he got here to America, especially getting by through the Great Depression. He had to go without a coat one winter because he couldn’t afford one.

My father told me that my grandfather would get up at 4 a.m. to walk five miles to a neighboring town to arrive at work at 6 a.m. I asked why he didn’t take a bus. My father said they always walked in Italy, and it was easier on flat land with sidewalks than in the mountains. Plus, my grandfather could save the 5 cents it cost for the bus ride and buy some food with that nickel.

So I asked my father one day: Why even come to America and face the hardships of living in a foreign environment, starting all over, working into the night, and all the other things that accompany an immigrant’s new life in a new land?

And his answer was simple. First, members of his family could sense that war was coming in Europe. Plus, America was the land of opportunity. It afforded a person through hard work what luxury and ease cannot bring – identity and self-realization.

You see, there is something within the heart of each of us that yearns to realize what we are wired to be and do. And then we want to be free to do it.

That heartfelt yearning is exemplified best in these stirring lines of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Inherent to our national motto is an understanding of the greatness of plurality and the necessity of having people who are different from each other work together and respect one another. We can only act upon this if we believe that we are all made in God’s image and are therefore equal.

America was founded upon the realization that we must have differences to be more fully one. When differences come together in an appreciation of our God-given opportunities, the resultant outcome is strength, not weakness.

This is just the opposite of what many seem to think today. We should not believe the same way or even the same things. We get along best when we have to interact with each other and rely on each other for our sustenance.

I am much more likely to get to know you, appreciate you and even befriend you when I’m sweating alongside you for a common goal. I may even learn from you and appreciate things I would never be confronted with unless I heard your voice, listened to what you said, and sensed the hope in your soul, which sounds a lot like my heart and soul.

There is no adequate substitute for looking into your eyes to see eternity in your soul and to hear the heartbeat of your dreams.

So this brings us back to my father’s idyllic life in that small nondescript Italian mountainside town. Why leave Shangri-La for potential hardship, sweat, and uncomfortable surroundings? Why leave behind one’s family to live among strangers?

Simple. Because the search for a better life has driven human progress through the ages. This has made our great nation a magnet to people from all over the world since it was founded, drawing men and women to America to reinvent themselves, enjoy unparalleled freedom, and become part of our great experiment in democracy. E pluribus unum!