Just read David Ehrens’s call for giving land to the Wampanoag. Having been raised by Richard and Pauline Serkey, it comes across as laughable that you would classify my father as “MAGA” or “right wing”. He has idolized progressive figures all his life, from JFK (at whose presidential museum he now volunteers) to Obama. They have always taught me to stand up for minorities, the working class, and anyone else whom established authorities try to exploit or scapegoat.
The idea that he’s pushing a religious agenda when he supports the pledge equally rings false – my parents raised me attending church at First Parish, Plymouth’s Unitarian Universalist congregation, true. But not only is UU extremely, notoriously, and explicitly liberal, my folks haven’t attended regularly for years, nor even occasionally more recently.
As you say, he spent his career and has spent years in town meeting and at the ZBA challenging land use, building plans, and other intentions but not just that: specifically challenging special privilege and conservative inertia, as when Massachusetts legalized marijuana and he fought for the town to set its guidelines so prospective businesses would know what to expect. He did this despite personal distaste for pot smoking, because he has always championed fair treatment of people, just as his challenging of land exemptions has always been rooted in the idea that there shouldn’t be gatekeeping on the way in which people use their land: if you want one owner to have such rights, change the law and grant the same to every owner in their position.
As the son of German Jews who fled the Holocaust, and having adopted me as an infant from South America, he knows full well that not all Americans trace back to those who routed the natives, and is perhaps making that point instead: that we came here after and every citizen of the USA who isn’t a Native American has benefitted unjustly from the European conquest, not just Plymouth locals. If he has voiced opposition to acknowledging the native claim on this land, I suspect it is born out of relative ignorance regarding the history of colonization (ironic, as the education I received at the secular private school I attended focused deeply in 3rd–6th grade social studies on the wrongs of colonization, slavery, and the Holocaust – the exact “woke” agenda true MAGAs now decry) and not of any belief that “America can do no wrong,” nor that the status quo is a result of a just-history only.
Remember that my 77-year-old dad’s knowledge of American founding history is rooted in a 1950s-era public school education. Perhaps you can recommend historical reading that might give my old man the perspective he needs to come ’round right on this issue.
– Ethan Miguel “E.M.” Serkey