In response to John Huer’s July 1 guest column [“On our last Independence Day”], I too decry our swift drift away from the founding ideals of the United States. Mr. Huer asks “How is such a national debacle possible? It was in the very blueprint that built America, the world’s first ‘pure’ democracy, which was already fated to crumble when time was ripe; and the time is now.”
I agree that the roots of the “national debacle” were in the “very blueprint that built America,” but I have to point out something that the writer completely misses in his analysis of the blueprint. This nation was only “spacious,” as he says, because the white European settlers stole lands that were already occupied and committed genocide on its inhabitants. It was then built on the backs of enslaved peoples. It is crumbling now for many reasons, but this is the root of the problem. Those roots are rotten, and such a nation is not entitled to call itself a democracy.
Ann Darling
Easthampton