When this edition begins to circulate, the new President-Elect will be sworn in, as usual, with his hand over a Bible.
In this country, a new president has always been well received as a symbol of change and progress. This is not the case with the newly elected president who was sworn in this Friday, January 20, 2017, not before a crowd that cheers him but before a crowd that repudiates him and threatens to boycott the most significant ceremony of Democracy.
As immigrants coming from a country where such manifestations are not allowed and are severely sanctioned, we are astonished at the freedom that protesters here enjoy, when protesting for the violation of their rights.
We are immigrants who came in search of freedom. Freedom of work, religion, expression, election and any other freedom that we can think of including the right to protest, and we are convinced that this country will continue to progress despite the omens.
To conclude, we want to bring up a paragraph from President Ronald Reagan’s inaugural address at his inauguration on January 20, 1981. Reagan mentioned a young man, Martin Treptow, who left his job in a small town barbershop in 1917 to go to France with the famed Rainbow Division. There, on the western front, he was killed trying to carry a message between battalions under heavy artillery fire.
We’re told that on his body was found a diary. On the flyleaf under the heading, “My Pledge,” he had written these words: “America must win this war. Therefore, I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone.”
The crisis we are facing today does not require of us the kind of sacrifice that Martin Treptow and so many thousands of others were called upon to make. It does require, however, our best effort and our willingness to believe in ourselves and to believe in our capacity to perform great deeds, to believe that together with God’s help we can and will resolve the problems which now confront us.
And after all, why shouldn’t we believe that? We are Americans!
