Politics Corner July 4

  

photo mine

 

 Happy Independence Day I spend much of my time here complaining about all of the many faults of this country. I see the Declaration of Independence as barely the beginning of a long, imperfect and incomplete experiment. It's easy to lose sight of how far we've come when we've sunk so low.

 

In some ways we are what our founders hoped for while in others we've exceeded expectations. I think that mostly we would be alien to them. That has nothing to do with modern inventions -- at least three of our founders were inventors and all of them adapted inventions from elsewhere. Our little tax revolt was inherently forward-looking. But when Thomas Jefferson wrote all "All men are created equal." he did not even mean all men. It was implicitly understood to mean white male landowners. Slavery was baked in to the Constitution to make certain that we held to that.

It has taken our entire history to expand rights as far as we have. We're hardly done yet and the current administration delights in proving how fragile those rights would be. I believe it was Jefferson who said something along the line of Freedom will be proved by each generation with blood. We only have to look at the ICE protests to see that. The poem at the base of Lady Liberty is a pipe dream at the moment.

But the USA remains a land of hope. We were never the shining city on the hill -- those who came up with that had a much stricter viewpoint. But there is a reason that so many migrants want to come here. Today, at least, they know that the streets are not paved with gold. We promise upward mobility which is far less common than promised but at least is possible. Our freedoms are under attack but when honored they rival the best of the rest of the world.

I became upwardly mobile through the easiest and most difficult way. The improbable relationship with someone outside my social league. This is not about me though, this is about the travel that I have been allowed. I know about all of the disparities here. I know the lines of separation and segregation, the gates of power, everything that separates us. I was born here and it has been ingrained since birth. It took a lot of growing up and growing my mind outward to see the lines and understand them.

I have been gifted with extensive travel and, better still, most of it was not to traditional vacation spots. This is not to say that I was backpacking from hostel to hostel. More often than not I travelled in comfort. But for example I have been up the west coast of Africa. South Africa is worse than us. We know that we're racist. They pretend that Apartheid is over while the white people sit down and are waited on by the black people. There were visible remnants of colonialism and slavery everywhere that I looked up the coast. Deep scars that will likely never heal. Angola is booming because they have taken their natural resources back. Still poor but not as poor as everyone to their north. Yet some of the friendliest people on earth -- I'm betting that it's because white faces are few. I've seen the same thing from Botswana to Cambodia.

I've also encountered friendliness in repressed places like Red China and Poland or Turkey and Hungary. We fight so much here because we take for granted what we have. For most of our history the world has alternately admired or feared us. Today they pity us. That's not a good look. We can be better. We need to be better. It is entirely possible that we will be better considering the deep unpopularity of our President who reshaped his party in his image. But we are fickle. And we've allowed too much money/power to accumulate in too few hands.

There will likely be more blood before we're through because those who hold the reins hold them with greed and not conscience. But we can expand freedom again. It's worth the fight.

 Political Discussion Welcome