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America the Beautiful – a patriotic American song first written as a poem by Katherine Lee Bates in 1893.

Today it is America the Ugly—an unpatriotic nation at war with itself, infested with cultural bias, racial hatred, and incurable political partisanship.

Last week my wife and I walked out of an H.E.B. store in Boerne, Texas. My wife had on a “Beto” t-shirt. An old man—a wretched, angry, mean-spirited old white man—stared at my wife with blind hatred. He said nothing.

There was a time in America when individuals with different political points of view expressed on t-shirts, bumper stickers, or signs in yards invited reasonable exchanges, polite political discourse, and handshakes amid laughter.

That was America the Beautiful—freedom to express one’s beliefs and values without open social conflict.

America the Ugly, however, is personified today by the white supremacists, cowardly gun-toting motherfuckers standing at Arizona polling places and other public venues trying to intimidate voters of color trying to cast their votes of choice.

Just one glance at these dimwitted soldiers of racial hatred, dressed out in their paramilitary garb, tells you exactly what they are.

What would these tin soldiers of hatred do if an armed patrol unit of the Nation of Islam disciples showed up to protect the people of color voters that the tin soldiers are trying to frighten.?

I tell you what they would do.

They would break every Usain Bolt record trying to get to their Ford-150s to “get the hell out of Dodge.”

They are cowards, just like that old white man standing in the H.E.B. parking lot fuming at his own inability to say what he was thinking.

And, folks, this is only the beginning – you will not know America the Beautiful a decade from now.We could very well have an exiled Vladimir Putin competing with Majorie Taylor Geen for a vice-presidential slot.