Opportunities

 

Here's to Dear Old Boston 

The home of the Bean and the Cod, 
Where Lowells speak only to Cabots, |
And Cabots speak only to God. 

Is America the Land of Opportunity, where we all speak to  God, or the Land of Caste, where only some speak to God.

The United States of America prides itself as the land of opportunity.  The plack on the Statue of Liberty reads

 "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

This is far cry from a land of caste.  Despite the Bible injunction in Matthew 18: 21-35, on not duplicating the sins of which you were forgiven, those founding America established their own version of the very caste system from which they had fled.   As the descendant of an Irish Catholic illegal immigrant, I can assure you that while blacks may not have been slaves in my home state of Massachusetts,  there is and was a caste system in Massachusetts.   As Isabel Wilkerson observed in her recent book, "Caste", racism is only the one US manifestation of casteism.

We can not be both a land of opportunity and a land of caste.  This November we have an opportunity to decide whether the spirit, or the current status, of America will prevail.