It’s that adverb. “Again.”

That is no accident. Toxic narcissists make up for lack of creativity and intelligence with base wordplay. “Again.”

Again does a lot of heavy living in that phrase. Make American Great… again.

No nation is great. No nation has ever been great. Nations are built on the backs of hierarchies. Things may be great for some, but never for all. Great is subjective. Great is in the eye of the beholder.

And any eye that beholds US history would need to be severely whitewashed and snow-blinded into not seeing two Holocaust-level human rights violations — genocides by any other name: the centuries of African slavery and the Native American genocide.

America is built on these two atrocities. There is no avoiding this realization and to do so is akin to ignoring an aggressive tumor. It metastasizes, it corrupts, it destroys. A country built on a foundation of horrific torture must exorcise such demons lest they destroy it from within. To support that thesis I present to you America 2025.

Two words, two seemingly innocuous words, even when accepted at face-value, contain horrors. Great…. again.

Great? American has had moments of greatness. No doubt. But was America ever truly great? Great is subjective. Great is in the eye of the beholder.

Once could say America showed signs of great when the founding fathers came together to create the Constitution, a groundbreaking document that established a republic…. but that same Constitution treated African Americans as 3/5 of a person and placed all power in the hands of White Men. Progress, I guess, for its time, but great?

Abolishing slavery, The New Deal, defeating fascism in WWII, all standouts in myriad moments of American history… but the problem with brushing a nation’s history with greatness is that the subjective simplicity of such branding alienates large swaths of the population whose experience was far from great.

The zero-sum, competitive capitalist mentality of those who aspire to power all but ensures that one man’s greatness (gender used purposely) comes at the expense of the lower castes.

Trump wants education to deemphasize the horrors of slavery in the US. Tell me you’re a racist man of privilege without telling me you’re a racist man of privilege.

And this frightens me because I see what is happening. I see him making the lives of normal people very difficult. And I can’t help but feel like he would do it to people like me if he could, and the only reason he doesn’t is because he can’t (yet), and instead he punches down at whomever he can get away with.

I often criticize the modern propensity to stretch language beyond its limits with some of the most inane verbal gymnastics. It’s a hobby of mine. Politics and business culture provide perfect foils. But one odd use of language I actually treasure is “more perfect,” as in “a more perfect union.”

I love the verbal/linguistic strangeness of it. More perfect. Well, how can anything be more perfect than perfect? I guess if one were to stop there, it would seem a lot less inspiring. Braggadocious even. “We’re so perfect we can only be more perfect!”

But if you take that breath and look for a moment longer, you see the brilliance of more perfect. My wife is perfect. I love her. She will always be perfect. But she gets more perfect every day.

Perfect is an ideal. Perfect is impossible. Perfect is all around us. Perfect is. And we get to make our world more perfect. Together.

I can’t think of anything more beautiful and more inspiring a foundation for a community. A union. I mean, what the hell are we here for otherwise? We’re primates. Animals designed to live in groups, blessed with higher-order thinking and the ability to work with our environment as well as against it.

I don’t want America to be GREAT AGAIN.
America has never been great.
I want a more perfect union.
With liberty and justice for all.