By Capt. Guy Higgins, US Navy ret, USNA ’69
Member of the Calvert Task Group

If you listen to, well, anything, today – cable, network, podcasts, print, blogs, or even smoke signals, you will hear people disrespecting other people over politics.

It reminds me of some old Kinston Trio lyrics, “The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles. Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch, and I don’t like anybody very much.”

Hating over US politics is just wrong. Disagreements are fine – we need to have them. Disagreements provide the start for logical abrasion – the process of wearing away the BS from my ideas and someone else’s ideas. That’s a good thing, but it doesn’t happen when we allow the various media to shepherd us into identity silos.

Listen to a left-leaning source and you’ll hear about:

• Young women
• Older women
• Black women
• Hispanic women
• Young Hispanic men
• Young Black men
• Boomers
• Milennials
• Gen Z’ers

And how they all failed to support VP Harris.

Listen to a right-leaning source and you’ll hear about:

• Young women
• Older women
• Black women
• Hispanic women
• Young Hispanic men
• Young Black men
• Boomers
• Milennials
• Gen Z’ers

And how President-elect Trump made inroads into all (or most) of those silos.

Guess what, all those groups share something – we are all Americans.

We, or our ancestors, came here because America was a land of promise – although many of Black fellow Americans did not. My paternal grandparents came here from Ireland in the Eighteenth Century for freedom and economic opportunity. My maternal grandparents came here from Poland (which was actually part of the Tsarist Empire at the time) near the turn of the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century for freedom and economic opportunity. They all found it.

Immigrants today are coming here for freedom and economic opportunity. They see a land of promise that may not be as good as conservative say it is, but it is certainly not as bad as progressives claim.

So, we’re all Americans, and I’m pleased that we are.

Let’s act like Americans and recognize the vast ocean of things on which we agree and debate those things on which we disagree— just not this week.

Let’s share Thanksgiving Day with Thanks that we live in America with the finest people in the world.