July 4th, 2019

On the eve of our nation’s 243rd birthday, I think about what America represents to the world, as a nation uniquely founded on a set of Enlightenment ideas governed by a Constitution, not embedded in tribalism and traditional authority. It has been a shared commitment to those ideals that has bound us together through our relatively brief history. We have no common ethnicity nor national religion, so it is only those ideals and the struggle to live up to them that binds us together as an American people. Our founders understood that they themselves fell short of fully living up to the ideals they proclaimed, but had faith that the shared commitment to those ideals would call upon the better natures of its citizens to make the union “more perfect”. We began as a nation of slaveholders and slavery-enablers, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, and went forward from there. We enshrined freedom of speech and of the press in our First Amendment, then one of our first administrations outlawed published criticism of the government, and even as recently as WWI our Supreme Court would endorse criminalization of expressions of anti-war opinion. We prohibited racial discrimination in the hard-won Fourteenth Amendment, but then discriminated by race as we interned Japanese-Americans during WWII. We put up the Statue of Liberty “lifting her lamp beside the golden door”, but then slammed that door shut on Chinese immigrants, and then on southern and eastern Europeans, and then we turned away boatloads of Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler. We seem to be a nation who proclaims ideals but then takes a good while to catch up in actual practice. That “shining city on a hill” we like to tout is not where we live yet, but it’s a glossy brochure of what we hope to build. We do seem to make slow progress when enough eyes focus on the shared vision. So when I look around today and despair how far short we still fall from our ideals, how far we are from the summit of that shining city, it is useful perspective to turn around and see where we started, and how far we have come. May the ideals that have sustained us so far continue to call us onward and upward. Happy birthday, America!