PERSONAL IDENTITY BASED ON SOCIAL MEDIA POST

Meeting new people who roll out their personal identity is a thrill when it works out. I’ve learned so much by listening. (No matter what people who know me say, I do listen, just not to them.)

An American family tradition, maybe your family tradition, is being kind to strangers, of giving others the benefit of the doubt, the old innocent until proven guilty ideal of personal identity.

The same rules for strangers and new friends includes family.

For example, my grandmother helped kids in her community go to college on a grandma scholarship, young people she didn’t know as well as she knew her grandkids.

I learned about it while I worked double shifts in a summer time mill job to pay for another year of college.

At the time helping others seemed like a good idea. At this time so many years later it’s still a good idea. The part I didn’t like was feeling that I was in line before a stranger.

But that was grandma’s choice to make, not mine. My personal identity after a summer feeding sheets of wood into plywood dryers was that of mill hand, not college boy saving money for the future.

It feels odd to say this, but once I snapped out my mill hand daze, I joined the Army instead of going back to college. Mill work was hard, hard enough to force a panic decision for this nineteen year old.

I told my dad my plan to drop out of the college he graduated from to join the Army. The main advice from this ‘resting Marine’ was just don’t join the Navy.

Two years later I was a college boy going to UofO on the GI Bill, a personal identity shared by a long line from the big green machine that came before me.

To anyone who has played sports in college, submitted to service in the armed forces, graduated from college, been married, had kids, owned a house, and worked a job, personal identity is easy: You, my friend, are an American, as American as it gets.

Along the life trail I’ve identified as an athlete, a gentleman, and a scholar. Others have identified with the same tags along with additional elements.

To readers around the world I’d like to show an element of American personal identity:

“Statue of Liberty Poem”

Also known as the Statue of Liberty poem, New Colossus and its famous last lines have become part of American history. Here is the sonnet in its entirety:

The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

For those looking for a place to start their personal identity, look no further. Remember to lose the storied pomp.

This quote from Huffington Post is not a foundation of a personal identity to share out loud, if it comes up in your brain:

In a meeting with lawmakers in the Oval Office in January 2018, Trump argued against restoring protections for immigrants from Haiti and African nations, describing them as “shithole countries,” sources told The Washington Post and NBC News.

“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” the president reportedly asked. “We should have more people from places like Norway.”

The following day, Trump claimed on Twitter that he hadn’t used those specific words, but Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) ― who was in the room at the time ― swiftly contradicted him, saying that the president had in fact “said these hate-filled things and he said them repeatedly.” 

Repeat to yourself: “I can do better.”