Eleven score and seventeen years ago, a few brave men in Philadelphia committed an act of treason. Fueled by the radical new notions of the French Enlightenment, they literally put their lives on the line in adopting a document that declared men (and, much later, women) to be perfectly capable of creating a functioning society without the steadying hand of a monarch. To the rest of the world, this wasn’t just rebellion, it was folly. Such a society could only collapse in chaos at best, anarchy at worst. Did we learn nothing from that whole Cromwell affair? Why did these men take such a personal - and more importantly, national - risk?
Perhaps we can answer that question by looking at why they didn’t.
They didn’t do it for “freedoms,” at least not in the sense Americans blithely take the word to mean “whatever I want to do, without consequence to myself or regard for my neighbor.”
They didn’t do it to create a culture of entitlement, a citizenry that expects the government to answer for both security and prosperity but balks at contributing to either.
They didn't do it to see a citizenry in ignorance. They saw glory in intelligence. Education and rational thought were the philosophical bedrock of the American experiment. It infuses every page of these men’s correspondence.
They didn’t do it to create a nation of swaggering braggarts. They understood that pride is weakness, humility strength. The ink wasn’t dry on Cornwallis’s surrender before Washington and others were reaching out to Britain. My parents’ generation not only saw no need to gloat after World War 2, but even extended a hand of friendship and help to our former enemies. It is only the weak who feel the need to say they’re number one. The truly powerful always treat the vanquished with dignity.
They didn’t do it to squelch public discourse. They would have been horrified to see partisans dismiss the merits of an opposing viewpoint while whitewashing the flaws in their own, until every American is playing the sainted martyr standing on the side of truth against those treasonous morons over there.
They didn’t do it to permit a tyranny of either the majority or the minority, where one side dictates the political agenda for all. An influential commentator recently declared “To us, bipartisanship is them being forced to agree with us after we politically have cleaned their clocks and beaten them.” That’s not just un-American, it’s anti-American.
They didn’t do it to see bearers of false witness attach their names to fabricated or tinkered quotes and used as political bludgeons.
They didn’t do it to see parents teach their children to hate people who look or think or vote differently than they do.
They didn’t do it to see “political compromise” turn from a cornerstone of enlightened democracy into a dirty word.
No, they did it because they believed in the principles of representative self-government. They did it to see a people come together, work through their differences, build a new nation. Together. They had faith in humanity. They had faith in America.
After touring the monuments in Washington, DC this past week, a wise young boy exclaimed to his parents, “Dang! Our country should listen to these guys!”
Yes. Let’s.
No comments:
Post a Comment