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What I Think M*G* Means By Greatness Again

Where were you in 1955?

Terry Barr
7 min readFeb 13, 2025
Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash

When you think about a time when America was truly great, what time or year or era comes to your mind?

Pause for a moment while you consider this:

I think it all rests on August 28th of this year and certainly of the years 2008, 1963, and most crucially, 1955.

I won’t name those commemorative events yet. First, let’s talk about what’s so “great” about America. Or rather, when or if America was ever great, if we mean by that, the greatest it could be for all.

First, we have to throw out the years beginning with our country’s inception through 1865, because during those decades our country countenanced, supported, and in some areas, thrived and existed solely on slavery, which by definition means the owning of another human being, even if our constitutional census tried to hedge on what constituted a human being.

That I even had to write such a paragraph should put all of us in agreement that America wasn’t the greatest land it could be in our first eight highly patriotic decades, or even just plain old great. Or good. We definitely weren’t Winthrop’s City on a Hill, and any covenant made between a Pilgrim/Puritan leader and his concept of God couldn’t have been signed in good faith seeing what they saw in…

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Terry Barr
Terry Barr

Written by Terry Barr

I write about music, culture, equality, and my Alabama past in The Riff, The Memoirist, Prism and Pen, Counter Arts, and am an editor for Plethora of Pop.

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The republican party has made us pay for electing a black President. The election of Barack Obama inspired the likes of Newt Gingrich and other republicans to focus on hate, fear, lies, selfishness and conspiracies to rile up gullible and racist…

This was a good read, and makes several excellent points. I trust you're cool with me adding a few.
1920 extended the franchise to women. Financial autonomy, bodily autonomy (a husband could not legally be accused of raping his wife) were a long time…

I saw several social media posts from MAGA people taunting Black people who voted MAGA. The message: no matter what you do, you are NOT part of the family. How anyone missed that the first time around is beyond me.