Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
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.
The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.
These three quotes may well sum up the miracle of America.
Even though we celebrate the birth of our nation this weekend, the birth isn’t the miracle. Humankind has made stabs at representative government before. Small, determined bands of idealists have fought and defeated mighty military powers before and since. We need only look to our recent past and Vietnam to see the sting of that truth.
No, the real miracle of America lies in the ideas we set forth at our birth and ensured in the Bill of Rights and in those who have had the courage to rub our nation’s nose in its own ideals and drag us toward a closer realization of America.
Sometimes we moved ahead in velvet revolutions of women marching for the right to vote.
Sometimes we moved ahead in clashing rage, on battlefields like Shiloh or Gettysburg.
Sometimes we moved ahead against high-pressure water hoses, attack dogs and panicked National Guard troops firing on protesting college students.
Sometimes we fell back, enshrining slavery in our Constitution — having declared universal equality, we then made some more equal than others.
Sometimes we fell back in fear and paranoia, putting our own citizens behind barbed wire during WW II simply because they were of Japanese descent.
Sometimes we gave in to naked greed, breaking treaties with Native peoples, taking the best land and shunting them off to the worst.
We have not been, nor are we, a perfect nation.
Nor have we ignored our imperfections — even if we’ve tried to compromise around them or hide them for generations at a time.
Americans have always come forth, no matter how unpopular or dangerous the message, to call us to “our better angels” as Lincoln said.
This was the genius of Martin Luther King. He saw the miracle of our ideals and simply demanded we live up to them. No exceptions.
And that’s the miracle of America — that we haven’t been able to scrub ourselves completely free of the ideas of universal equality and of liberty to worship as we choose, to disagree with our government, to express our ideas as we wish.
That there have always been just enough idealists and great men and women to keep those ideals alive and because of that, despite our tragic mistakes and human flaws, we remain the Hope.
There’s a reason those signs in Iran protesting the recent election weren’t written in Russian or Chinese.
And that’s what we celebrate this weekend.
Ipswich
