To the refugees of the world,

Greetings from a fellow traveler. I, the founder and chairman of the Unity Party of America, write to you from Germany. While I began writing this message in Heidelberg (hence the title), I’ve since been transferred to Stuttgart. Such, of course, is often the life of those seeking a safer, better existence in a new land.

In the strictest sense, I’m not a refugee myself, seeing as how I was born in this country to American parents and spent 43 years in the States before returning.

Needless to say, we refugees/returnees are feeling less welcome in our new homes as well as our old ones with every passing day. The world is getting smaller in many ways, but also colder, and the global asylum system established by the well-meaning victors of the Second World War has been exposed as haphazard and ineffective as any system imposed upon reluctant sovereign nations by a victorious, idealistic and naive United States must inevitably be.

It’s time for a better way for the world. While all of us should continue to fight for our rights as human beings to the Four Freedoms (Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Faith, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear), in new lands if necessary, we should all also fight for those Freedoms in any land we happen to call “home.”

“What could be done new, something that hasn’t been tried before?” you ask. I answer with, “The expansion of the American Dream to all corners of the globe.”

The United States has worked so well thus far because it is so united. Setting aside the recent hijacking of the American airliner by some guy from Queens, America has worked quite well as a melting pot, because it is a melting pot. From the first sailing of the Mayflower to America in 1620, Americans have learned to get along, mixing dialects, languages, cultures, cuisines, customs and genes in the process, because they’ve had to get along to survive as a nation (Americans today seem to have forgotten the example of our first Civil War, and never learned the example of the German version on steroids, the Thirty Years’ War, and other versions around the world, but they’ll come around eventually, hell or high water).

And not only can citizens of the world’s other nations be in place when America regains its sanity, citizens of other nations can help America regain its sanity.

Just as the weaknesses of the UN Charter on Human Rights have been exposed when those Rights have been placed under stress, the weaknesses of the (almost) 250-year-old American political system have been exposed by the stress of fascism. Among other things, America’s Founding Generation made the President too powerful, giving him (generally, anyone who seeks more power than he needs is a “him”) the right to re-election and the ability to pardon his pals, and allowed him to hold lawmakers hostage with leadership of political parties, parties that the Founders failed to acknowledge the inevitability of.

And while the US Constitution is a singularly remarkable document imitated and even copied many times over throughout subsequent history, it had its flaws when it came to the creation of Congress as well, namely not foreseeing gerrymandering and the possibility that lawmakers would dare to choose their voters, instead of allowing voters their lawmakers, and thus further dividing the US House into corrupt and mutually hostile camps unable to communicate.

The key to all of this is the current (and perhaps the next) President’s vanity. As of this writing, there is much talk (and a bit of action) regarding American expansion, although (not surprisingly at all), that talk is of the jingoistic, imperialistic variety, with it apparently never being considered that the aspirations, ambitions and desires of the targeted nations should be considered.

I dare say that the peoples of nations beyond America should be considered, and should begin to be conceived of as Americans, Americans with an equal footing in a renewed and newly-expanding nation extending a tried-and-true democracy to all corners of the globe, pushing back borders and thus grounds for war, division, poverty and arbitrary limitations on the potential of all human beings.

Seeing as how the United States, with its immense power and resources, will either save the world or destroy it, determining the destiny of the planet, the peoples of all nations should rightly speak up and demand a say in their destiny. Any nation on Earth viable as one of the United States can and should demand two US Senators and proportional representation in the US House. To both prevent a nation from being hoisted aboard a doomed plane, and to preserve democracy for all Americans, any new United State should demand participation in a free and fair American federal election, verified as free and fair by observers of its choice, before joining the US as an additional state. One might summarize all of this with the revolutionary slogan “No Expansion Without Representation.”

And even before the Mayflower, there was the phenomenon that I will now label the “Jamestown Principle.” The English overlords in America learned early on that, with Jamestown surrounded by wilderness, the human rights of all that colony’s inhabitants had to be respected, if only because a disrespected laborer only had to wander off into Indian country to regain their dignity and freedom. Imagine, my fellow citizens of the world who have been disrespected and who also happen to have a modest talent or two, how you might be treated if your state’s government knows that all you have to do to for the dignity of you, your family and your future family is to cross an invisible line between US states.

So I say to you, fellow travelers, work to make this world better by advocating for all Americans, current as well as future, both where you are and where you are from. Let us all envision a planet with zero borders, one flag (nine stripes for the first nine states needed to ratify the 1787 Constitution and thus start the Republic on its way, plus a Milky Way’s worth of stars, one for each state), and billions of citizens voting in elections instead of fighting in wars. A sizable percentage of the global population would already like to become American, and we should all suspect that that percentage would be much higher if the Mother of Exiles’ “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” knew they could just stay put at home amongst their “storied pomp” and form Unity Parties within democracies jump-started and encouraged by the prospect of a European Union on steroids.

To paraphrase a few fellow German-borns: Refugees of the world, unite!