Who Are We, America?

When I was in High School in the mid 1960s, I was a tenor in the A Cappella Choir. One of the most inspiring pieces of music we did was a rendition of “Give Me Your Tired Your Poor,” originally composed by Irving Berlin and, of course, written by the poet Emma Lazarus.

Lazarus’s words are inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. How many millions of immigrants saw those words as they arrived on our shores, fear and uncertainty in the faces, but hope and freedom in their hearts! As I sang those words over and over I always visualized the black and white pictures we all remember of the bedraggled masses gazing upon that Statue with those words writ large on the base as they sailed into the harbor.  Now I have a new portfolio of images to associate with the words.....

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send me the homeless tempest tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Close your eyes and imagine, if you can, finally arriving on a boat with hundreds of other people, all fearing the unknowable future, seasick from weeks of a difficult ocean crossing, but gambling their lives on a dream, seeing those words, feeling the presence of that gleaming statue with it’s outstretched arm and torch.

Was that feeling any different from the thousands of refugees crossing the borders of Mexico over the past four decades, fleeing drug cartels, war, poverty, looking for a better life for their children? I think not.  

Think of how our country’s emotional condition has morphed over those same four decades. We have changed from a nation of immigrants welcoming those seeking a better life to a nation of tribal selfishness that seeks to ostracize and separate all those “tired and poor.” We accuse them of crime, we accuse them of greedy indolence, we seek to deport them. Who cares if they are human? They are “other,” and therefore should not be here with us pure citizens. 

Take a moment and listen to Lazarus’spoem with Berlin’s music sung by the Norman Luboff Choir as you scroll through the pictures below......

Where is our humanity?

Who are we, America?