Is Apple Pie Next?

By Joni Halpern

I was taking a little inventory of paramount American values that are still viable after the onslaught of the last few years of intractable divisiveness among our people.  I thought my list would be long.  It wasn’t.

I started out listing a value Americans have always cherished.  We insist we are the architects of our own destiny, that the lowliest members of society can reach the stars if they work hard enough to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.  However, if we look closely at this “bootstrap” value, we can see it appears to be crumbling at its foundations.

The “bootstrap value” has become something of a fiction for many people who have been trying to keep themselves and their families fed, housed and clothed, let alone managing whatever it takes to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.  Even in what remains of the middle class, there is great uncertainty about how to prepare children for economic stability.  Many among the affluent are eroding their assets in retirement funds and home equity to provide for immediate needs of their adult children and grandchildren.

Beyond the problems afflicting the middle class as a whole, the “bootstrap value” has been unattainable for entire racial and ethnic groups in America, due to the historic disadvantage of racism and exclusion.  In the past, thousands of laws across this nation overtly allowed the abuse, exclusion or even murder of Native Americans, African-Americans, persons of Hispanic origin, Chinese, Japanese, Jews, and at various times, immigrants and refugees from every part of the world.  There were no bootstraps for these people when the law was against them.  And even for many people of color now “liberated” by so-called race-neutral laws, there is still the residue of racism in unchallenged policies and practices that defeat their progress in our society.

We call ourselves a nation rooted in “the rule of law,” another American value.  We are fond of saying “We are a nation of laws, not of men.”  But lately that seems to have been true only as justification for quelling the protests of people fighting for racial justice, union membership, economic fairness, and other broad themes that became the subject of open protests.

On January 6, 2021, we witnessed an attempt to overthrow our government.  The politicians and public officials who supported that attempt were not concerned with laws, but rather with “men,” calling the participants in the outrage “patriots,” “tourists,” “peaceful protesters,” and “good people,” “very special people.”  Among the relatively few who have been called to account for their conduct that day, several have pleaded for mercy not as warriors for the enforcement of election laws – which is how they portrayed themselves during the insurrection – but as men, human beings, unable even to comprehend how they had engaged in such heinous behavior.   Treat us as “a nation of men, not laws” was their plea at sentencing.

As for the United States flag, another of our treasured values, participants in the assault on the Capitol were not marching under the Stars and Stripes.  They were marching under the flag of a named individual covetous of imperial enthronement.  In his honor, and at his behest, they bashed windows of an elected legislature, broke furnishings and symbolic statuary, stole private papers, searched out political leaders to kill or harm, and beat uniformed police officers, pitting themselves against democratic elections in order to crown a new king.  So much for the U.S. flag as a cherished American value.

Is “apple pie” the next American value on the chopping block?