Here's My Birth Certificate

Since Donald Trump is so interested in people's birth certificates, and since the President was classy enough and thoughtful enough to show his, perhaps it is best that we all show him ours. So let me start with mine -- which just happens to be the same as that for everyone in this nation:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Those words are the birth certificate of a nation, and therefore, the birth certificate of each and every one of us who was born on this nations' soil, the soil of a possession of this nation, a recognized territory of this nation, or who has been naturalized by the Federal government of this nation. What any document containing the information about the birth of any one us says is irrelevant, compared to those words, which turned a loose confederation of former English colonies into a new nation, conceived in liberty, and built upon the idea that all her citizens were created equal.



There is only one reason that anyone, anyone, has made an issue of where President Obama was born: his skin color. Deny it though they may, that's what it boils down to. Forty-three Presidents before him were as white as snow, but the nation set right a wrong that was long-overdue to be corrected, by putting its faith in a someone who was not white. A black man became President, and the worst fears of hundreds of thousand of closeted and not-so-closeted racists came to pass -- power was stripped from the hands of their race. The citizenry of a nation conceived in freedom and liberty, forged in the fire of civil insurrection, reborn in the struggle to fully enable civil rights for everyone, took a chance at last, and did what no one of these bigoted sycophants ever thought possible. It got under their skin, this idea that they no longer had a choke hold on the highest office in the land. The damage is done, and can never be undone, and it is like societal fingernails on the chalkboard of their narrow and closed minds.

Raise this issue again, if you dare, but be warned: do so and you mark yourself completely as a bigot, a racialist, a reprehensible and amoral retainer of the forces of intolerance. But those of you who made issue of it, even though you may drop it now, do not think you are somehow off the hook. By initially declaring your allegiance to an idea that, on its face, was conceived in the dark ignorance and piteous sophistry, you showed a side of your persona that perhaps you could simply explain away as natural doubt, but really is the hallmark of someone who, wrapped in some form of overt and vapid privilege, has determined that certain people are still not "allowed" to join the party.

Donald Trump, Orly Taitz, Mike Huckabee... the list is seemingly endless. It's very easy, when you can commandeer the public spotlight -- with the implicit and tacit approval of a ratings-hungry "news" media -- to spew forth your ignorance and assume that because you have access to such media, you cannot be held to account for your vitriol, your bigotry, and your lies. You would be wrong. You have made the cardinal mistake of the fool, opening your mouth and removing all doubt. If you expected us to take you seriously, you were sadly mistaken. Despite assurances from your "yes men," we are not as stupid as you were led to believe. The average American may not be a rocket scientist or a nuclear physicist, and there may be some issues with education in our nation, but the vast majority of us are learned enough and knowledgeable enough to see through you and your prevarication in the name of "truth."

Frankly, the President of the United States, representative of our nation, and thus answerable to everyone, did not have to answer to you, in our eyes. From the very first, the majority of us knew this was a non-issue, a distraction, a sideshow, a non-starter that should have died with the election of President Obama. Sadly, the media breathed life into it, and the die-hard fringe elements could not let it go, buttonholing everyone, forcing it to remain an issue long after its shelf life was up. And the President tried, tried so hard, to simply remain above the fray, but finally, when it stood in the way of his getting people to pay attention to the serious problems of a nation, he felt he had no choice but to quell the idiocy once and for all. He was brief, he was eloquent, he was forthright -- "silliness" was a mild rebuke compared to the one we would have chosen. The moment came, he did his duty, and now we are expected to move on.

Consider this a warning: your time is up. The tent is folding. The circus is leaving town. If you choose to stand on your soapbox and continue to shill your asinine conspiracy theories, you relegate yourselves to a footnote in the history books, if even that. Don't think this goes just for birth certificates. Short of tax records, the President is not required to provide anyone with anything as far as paperwork goes. What he is required to provide us with is leadership and governance, and to maintain the nation, and see that it continues far beyond his term. Anything you do to interfere with the President's duties, anything you do to try and sidetrack the narrative, anything you do to derail the health of this nation with your sophomoric antics and ignorant skulduggery, will mark you as a pariah, someone to be ignored, someone to be overlooked.

This nation has serious issues, and it needs serious people with the will to solve them to step up and do their part. We have no time for you and your prattling and bigotry any longer. Step aside, and let those of us with the will and courage to do what needs to be done get to work.