Blog 3275 – 10.20.2024

We Are Family

When I look in the mirror, I am reminded that for almost seventy-four years I have inhabited the body of a white guy so that makes me appear to most everyone as just another old white guy. But I am more than that even as you are infinitely more than the house you live in even if you have resided there for many years. We are family.

I marvel that so many of my brothers and sadder still that many of even my sisters are reluctant to vote for a sister for President, when it seems so self-evident to me that Kamala Harris is by far the most qualified candidate running for the office. Still I am trusting that when it is crunch-time and my family goes to vote that better sense and wisdom will prevail over the fear and division that the “disloyal opposition” is counting on.

Arguably the best President this country ever knew, Abraham Lincoln (and yes he was a Republican) famously said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” We Americans were for five dreadful years during the mostly deadly war we have ever known a family at war with itself.

After the dust and smoke settled more than a half a million soldiers were dead and many more crippled and scarred from that conflict.

I was born and grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee where several great Civil War battles took place. I spent a great deal of time as a boy at the Chattanooga National Cemetery founded a year before Arlington National Cemetery and at the a Chickamauga Battlefield just outside the Chattanooga city limits and across the state line in Georgia.

The animosity and mistrust engendered by that awful conflict has lingered in our family far too long. This great national experiment in trying to create a more perfect union has suffered other setbacks during our almost two hundred and fifty years as a nation. There have been great steps forward as well, in 2008 we elected the first black President and I was so proud of our nation as were many in the world. Not Donald Trump, who for years has claimed that President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S.A. That is but one of his many lies. One of the stated aims of Project 2025, which was written by Trump former staffers despite his claim of knowing nothing about it, is to do away with the American birthright of becoming a U.S. citizen by just being born here, an obvious attempt not to make America great again, but less than the city on a hillside that a far more beloved and popular Republican President, Ronald Reagan compared our beloved nation to.

The hope of my heart is that when the dust settles from this Presidential campaign and all the votes are cast and counted that by an overwhelming majority we as a nation will have decided to put family interests ahead of partisan or political and voted to continue this experiment of trying to create a more perfect union. We are family and I hope we act like it.

Your friend, fellow traveler, and brother actually,

David White

We Are Family

We Are Family

We Are Family