Make America great for all of us

By Alonzo Weston

Everybody knows by now that a lone gunman made an assassination attempt on former president and current Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump last Saturday while addressing a campaign rally near Buller, Pennsylvania.

We also know the shooter was a 20-year-old man described as a loner and bullied oddball who was a registered Republican. He fired eight rounds from an AR-!5 style rifle from a roof outside the rally venue that killed one audience member, critically injured two others and took a Mike Tyson bite-sized chunk out of Trump’s upper right ear.

What we don’t know is a motive and why the shooter’s dad gave him the rifle a few years ago when it was also reported that he was dismissed from a school rifle team for not being a good marksman.

The attempt was eerily reminiscent of the 1981 assassination attempt of then-president Ronald Reagan. After being shot, Trump rose from behind the podium and in usual hubris pumped his fist and chanted “Fight, fight, fight.”

President Joe Biden said after the shooting “There’s no place in America for this kind of violence. It’s sick. It’s sick. It’s one of the reasons we have to unite this country.”

Trump later mimicked Biden’s speech in saying we have to unite the country, which seemed odd to me since he is hugely responsible for dividing it. This Make America Great Again rhetoric ignored that America wasn’t great for many of its citizens. When was America great for minorities, gays and women who for years faced discrimination and lack of opportunity? The country Trump and his followers see as “when America was great” existed only on TV shows like “Leave It to Beaver” and “Ozzie and Harriet.”

Many believe that this assassination attempt on Trump emboldens his presidential run against Biden.

This to me is more proof that we are now living in a Bizarro universe America where right is wrong and rhetoric instead of common sense rules.

Some years back, we were ready to lynch President Bill Clinton for two indiscretions that we knew of, and if President Obama had pulled some of the same shenanigans as Trump he would have been lynched by the churches.

Yes, churches now defend their support of Trump by saying the Bible used all fallen men for the good of all, but not Clinton. I once attended a church where the pastor posted pictures of people he said were going to burn in hell, and two of those photos were of Bill Clinton and Sadaam Hussein. I left that church shortly afterward.

I remember after 9/11 how we all united against a common enemy who attacked us. We weren’t Democrats and Republicans then, we were Americans. Yet heaven forbid if you were an American Muslim then.

We have to make America great and realize that it’s still a work hopefully in progress.