The American effort to achieve independence from Britain was not expected to succeed, but it did, with some timely help from friends abroad. ADVERTISING The American effort to achieve independence from Britain was not expected to succeed, but it did,
The American effort to achieve independence from Britain was not expected to succeed, but it did, with some timely help from friends abroad.
The new country’s grand experiment in representative self-government was not given much of a chance, either, but it has survived.
The idea of a nation — not an empire, but a nation — melded from many nationalities, ethnic groups and religious faiths was inconceivable to most of the world, but it has been realized over the 239 years since independence was boldly declared in Philadelphia.
The essential element in all of this was, as Abraham Lincoln said, the ability of the people and their leaders to “think anew and act anew” when the times demanded it.
Lincoln was not making any vapid campaign speech when he uttered those words in 1862. He was calling on Congress to deal with the crisis of slavery, which had plunged the United States into civil war.
His subsequent Emancipation Proclamation and then the 13th Amendment, ending slavery, and, later, the 14th, guaranteeing the rights of all Americans, including former slaves, dismantled the country’s most shameful institution.
But the aftermath has been prolonged and painful, with much violence and repression. In the process, however, a new standard of nationhood has gradually developed, one characterized by the qualities of tolerance and inclusion.
Old hatreds persist among a dwindling number of Americans, but their effusions are largely ignored — until some shocking act brings them into the public eye.
The hideous, apparently racially motivated killings last month in a Charleston, South Carolina, church were of a magnitude, and provided a degree of moral clarity, that made them more than just a passing sensation for news media.
The acquiescence of many Southern leaders in the display of such symbols as the Confederate battle flag seems finally to have come to an end.
The grief and alarm at the slayings of nine good people studying the Bible allegedly by a young white man whom they had welcomed into their group had made it a moment for thinking anew and acting anew.
Making independence work, maintaining a united nation, is in fact the task of centuries and requires a steady increase in mutual knowledge, respect and, probably most important, understanding among the many sorts
of people who make up this
country.
And it requires disinterested, fair-minded and sometimes courageous actions by our leaders.
Justice Anthony Kennedy said it well last week in his Supreme Court opinion on marriage equality.
“The nature of injustice,” he wrote, “is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.”
The learning experience
goes on.
This weekend we can enjoy our National Recess.
— Washington Post
