United we Stand; Divided we Fall.
Thank you for taking the time and having the inclination to rebuild our country. This site will share posts by various contributors who will present their perspective so that each of you can choose to comprehend, discern and integrate some aspects of the thoughts presented into your worldview.
We hope through gaining exposure to articles presented here, you will get inspired to join the effort to renew the United States and live the spirit of 1776!
III
Nearly 57 years ago today, Martin Luther King, Jr announced on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial a dream, nay a yearning for racial equality in his home country: the United States of America. Recalling the words of Thomas Jefferson, King demanded both equality before the law, and equality within our society, for African-Americans in our nation.
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
King’s vision saw far into the future, but recalled our past: no doubt America failed to fully embody the sacred principles declared by our founders in 1776, but largely since our birth the arc of history slowly bent towards justice.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Despite immense progress towards King’s dream, we remain well short of his vision over half a century after King died at the hands of a hateful assassin. It is shamefully true today that the color of your skin can still determine your fate when meeting a police officer, when applying for a job, or when seeking redress before a judge. Despite de jure equality before the law, our society remains woefully segregated, despite the yearning of many for equality.
However, while King’s movement remains incomplete it would be folly and improperly cynical to conclude King’s dream left little impact on American society. The Civil Rights movement, led by King and implemented by President Lyndon Johnson, bent the arc of history towards justice. King’s “I Had a Dream” speech will forever mark an inflection point in our society where we renewed the promise of 1776 and charted a course towards a more prosperous future better shared by all of our country’s citizens. It was not the first, and must not be the last.
II
On July 3rd, 1863 Union soldiers repelled a dreadful frontal assault led by Gen. George Pickett on the fields of Gettysburg. When Virginian infantry briefly crossed the crest of Cemetery Hill, they achieved the high water mark of the Confederacy: never again would the South come closer to achieving secession, nor would they break the country. Four months later Abraham Lincoln delivered a short speech to commemorate the battlefield.
“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The cause for which tens of thousands of brave men died became clear two months prior when Abraham Lincoln declared all slaves in the South free in the Emancipation Proclamation. If in 1861 Lincoln’s goal was to simply save the Union (as Lincoln himself said: with slavery intact, weakened, or destroyed a comparatively trivial matter), the goal after Gettysburg became clear: the end of American slavery, our founding crisis.
The American Civil War cost the country dearly in terms of blood and treasure, but it ended for all time the structural impasse which impeded national unity since the founding. What started as largely a difference in economics between a highly agricultural south, and a relatively industrialized north, eventually became a political poison which subverted every other issue in American politics. Even the simple addition of states to the Union became part of an intra political struggle within the United States. Of course, the internal struggles of one country pales in comparison to the incalculable suffering of America’s slaves, who endured unspeakable conditions in bondage. The eventual emancipation of America’s slaves renewed America’s core principles, as Lincoln himself reminded his audience on the fields of Gettysburg.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
As Thomas Jefferson himself recognized: no nation that held millions in bondage could consider itself the “Land of the Free, and Home of the Brave”. When Lincoln freed the slaves the arc of our history once again renewed itself, and bent a little more towards a brighter future.
I
On July 4th, 1776: America’s fathers wrote an extraordinary document rejecting the British crown, and declaring independence from monarchical tyranny. Largely under the guise of “No Taxation without Representation” (amongst other perceived wrongs), American colonists fought against Britain and strived for a nation conceived in liberty, based on freedoms Britons regularly enjoyed across the Atlantic in England. In frustration of failing to enjoy these rights Jefferson wrote:
“when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Many American colonists viewed British rule as an intolerable experience which deprived them of their rights. To secure these rights American colonists fought a revolutionary war to create a new nation with a government designed to secure those rights in perpetuity. Jefferson’s opening lines became emblematic of the founding premise of the American nation, and the basis for which both Lincoln freed the slaves in 1863, and King demanded equality a century later:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”
That all men are created equal. These words form the basis of every civil rights movement in American history. They are the rallying cry for each American to renew the promise of our founding, and to remind Americans of why our forebears founded this country over two centuries ago: to create a country based on the idea that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are: Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”. If America exists for a reason, it must be to embody the spirit of 1776 and work domestically, and abroad, to champion these rights for all mankind.
IV
The work of 1776 continues today, and the work of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King is not finished. While America was never as free, never as equal, and never as prosperous as it is today: our country remains woefully far from the core ideals of our founding. As Americans we must continue to bend the arc of history closer to our ideals. Thomas Jefferson rightly noted in 1776 that
“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed”.
The goal of each national renewal is to ensure that our country never falls to decadence, and sufferable injustice. Our goal, and our purpose, must be to live up to those ideals, and reform our government to renew the spirit of 1776 so our country can breathe a new freedom which better instills the justice every American deserves.
I leave you, fellow citizens, with a thought from Frederick Douglas who on another July 4th, generations ago, commended America for its successes. However, he warned: the promise of freedom Thomas Jefferson gave to his nation, he denied to his slaves. Thus, the work for liberty remained incomplete. The life of a man, Douglas argued, was short: “three score plus ten” years, he said, but the life of a nation stretches eons. Our country remains incomplete, inchoate, still striving for the promise of 1776. So if previous generations bestowed upon us a country, conceived in liberty, and great in wealth, we must ourselves work to improve it and refine it further. As Douglas said:
“Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy a child’s share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence”
We cannot rest, look upon our country, and call it great. Our country must constantly renew its greatness, for each generation to pass onto the next. We face challenges today which we must solve both from foreign plagues to internal strife. I call on my fellow citizens to come together, as we’ve done before, and again fulfill the promise of 1776.