Sometimes irony just slaps you in the face. Such is the case with Saturday’s Concord Monitor (5/29). Start with Mike Moffett’s short essay about American exceptionalism. There should be more of it, he laments. Think of all those great American accomplishments, from Jackie Robinson to landing on the moon. But just to the left of his words was a Letter to Editor about anti-Semitic graffiti spread by white supremacists in Nashua. Then there was the front-page story of a white community in Tulsa that 100 years ago burned down the Black community in Tulsa, leaving 10,000 homeless and hundreds dead, just because they were Black.
While I take pride in being an American, maybe even at times thinking we are exceptional, it also comes with understanding of a fuller picture. The problem with “exceptionalism” is it too easily becomes “superiority.” One other irony deserves mention. I don’t think Mike has ever written something for the Monitor that doesn’t somewhere comment about those horrible Democrats and their liberal ideas — and this essay falls true to the rubric. It would seem they (we, me) are the root of all that is bad and evil. And by implication they certainly are a block to American exceptionalism. So I am a little unclear about Mike’s challenge to look up at the moon and think of those exceptional Americans who walked on its surface. As I remember, it was a Democratic president who put America on that trajectory.
John Gfroerer
Concord