The Myth Reimagined

AT WAR

Torn by the difficulties in our society driven by the hard years of the Covid pandemic, America seems at war with itself.

We insist that it has never been like this.

The truth is that it one way or other, it has always been like this.

So much happening in the country indicates discontent and triggers arguments that are deliberately enhanced by both commercial and social media.

The ever-increasing encroachment of technology has amplified everything so that it seems new, different and far worse than we have ever known. But the amplification of reality is not the reality itself.

What is new is the presence of a kind of criminality strengthened by guns everywhere…from street-fighting, to brazen hold-ups and shop lifting to the ever -present mass shootings…291 already …more mass shootings than the days in the year.

What is new is that we are in the middle of a growing conflict between the young and the old with very different views of what life is and what life needs to be. We see it best in the political world. We are electing and maintaining older men and women on the national stage who have made a career of politics with all the baggage that comes with it. At the same time, we are electing very much younger men and women to local and State governments. They are for the most part well-meaning but sadly and with no fault of their own, the most poorly educated Americans in modern times.

Equally, we are dealing again with problems we thought we had fixed. In a country of immigrants, we are mired in a decades long failure to develop a humane immigration policy and so face a blizzard of migrants from Latin and South America waiting on our Southern border.

National disagreements about abortion and equality and safety for LGBTQ Americans seemed settled, but they exist with a vengeance.

Now there is the problem of gender identity and an effort to achieve gender safety and equality through diversity, but instead we find a fight that has found a battleground in elementary school classrooms and on school boards.

And of course, the spectacle of Donald Trump continues with the support of tens of millions who believe in his open disrespect for government because they feel that way too.

How can all of this division exist in a country which two and a half centuries ago declared itself to be one nation, indivisible?

DIVISIBLE

One year before the publication of the Declaration of Independence freeing them from British rule, the existing 13 colonies formed a Continental Army which would be ready to fight for independence.

One year after the Declaration in 1776, Betsy Ross designed the first American Flag.

One hundred and fifteen years later in 1892. the Pledge of Allegiance to that flag and the country it represented was written.

It declared this country was indivisible and stood for liberty and justice for all
The Declaration never spoke of the new nation as indivisible and never promised justice for all. The key to that document was always liberty, as the founders saw freedom as the primary need.

It opened with the statement that God created all men equal, entitled by that fact to a life of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The Declaration renamed the 13 colonies, States. It directed them to form individual governments and to pursue their own interests as they had the right to do as free men.

There was never any indication that the founders recognized or considered the concepts of ‘justice and ‘one nation indivisible’. Our founders were men of means at the top of an economic and political hierarchy. They saw themselves as arbiters of justice. They believed that the States had the right to do as they wished in a time when the Federal Government was but a whisper. These men did not break away from one government just to form another to rule them.

In fact, the States – especially those in the South – had already accepted the value of the free labor provided by slavery. The farm and plantation crop producers of the South took total advantage of slavery while the manufacturing businessmen in the North never really took that advantage.

These far different economic forces thus had very different attitudes towards the existence of slavery.

And so, the new nation was already involved in a deep disagreement…one that increasingly affected the economic and cultural realities of those living in the Northern and Southern States.

It took 80 years for this “disagreement” to be settled. Sensing the growing movement toward abolishing slavery, the southern states began to form their own government determined to secede from the Union. It elected its own President and Congress.

As President Abraham Lincoln increased pressures on the Federal government to finally abolish slavery, the new Confederacy of southern states acted.

In 1861, it went to war with the North attacking Ft. Sumter in South Carolina. As the war between the states continued Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 activated the Federal Government to declare the end of slavery.

The Civil War lasted for four years. More Americans died in that war than in all the wars fought before and since.

History states the War ended in 1865 but the impact of it exists today…as does the image of divisible.

The removal of monuments extolling those who led the Confederacy, removal of Confederate flags from capital cities in the South, the removal of a statue of Thomas Jefferson from the New York City Council Chambers just a few months ago are just an indication that while the War concluded, it left its mark.

The abundance of Confederate flags and uniforms seen at the January 6th clash at the Capital Building in DC just a year ago indicates that the war’s essence – fight against the Federal Government – still has a life.

America was purposely ‘divisible’ at the very beginning and remains so today.

INJUSTICE

The Pledge of Allegiance’s promise of justice for all rings hollow if you just consider the ways in which our nation has fostered injustice.

Slavery introduced the essence of racism so deeply into our society that it suggests the reality of an American caste system as deeply engrained as the system in India. We wrote about that last year when we examined Isabel Wilkerson’s prize-winning book about that reality.

Despite obvious strides for those very special few – including President Barack Obama – and the very latest attempts at diversity and an examination of reparations for the ancestors of slaves – racism never goes away. The idea of an irreparable caste system must be acknowledged…even as we try in one way or another to rip it out by its very deep roots.

Because it existed here before we were a nation, nothing else in our history is as severe.

But there have been other significant examples of injustice.

In the 1800’s, we removed American Indian tribes (called savages in the Declaration) from their land in the East and South and marched them, literally marched them, across the country to Oklahoma and into “reservations” where we essentially left them to their own devices. We removed them from their land and took their property and gave them a life they did not want.

We marched 15,000 of the Cherokee nation from Georgia to Oklahoma in the famous “Trail of Tears” and four thousand died in the process.

Life for Native Americans was never the same.

We put 120,000 Japanese Americans…born here, citizens here…in concentration camps during the height of the war with Japan.

Antisemitism was so severe during the years of World War ii that with the support of many citizen groups like The Bund in New York City, Congress fought against President Roosevelt’s efforts to bring European Jews who had escaped Hitler’s concentration death camps into the US; many ships carrying survivors were turned away. Pressure from within his own cabinet led by his wife, Eleanor drove him to change the policy despite Congressional disapproval.

It took America 144 years to make it legal for a woman to vote.

Clearly the promise of’ justice for all’ was not the thread which made America the most productive and powerful nation in the history of the World.

But the promise of ‘liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ was and no matter our behavior or our attitudes, it is the indestructible element of American exceptionalism.

REALITY

Unless you have actually lived and worked in a number of different States and areas in this country and lived among the people there, you cannot imagine the differences – some broad, some subtle – that exist between them.

But if you have, you know that the problems described above have existed to one degree or another for generations – if not centuries. And you recognize the marvel that these inherent differences, powerful and sometimes ugly, have neither destroyed this country nor murdered the promises offered since its existence.

The clearest and most obvious reality of all is found now on the Southern border of this country.

The tens of thousands of Latin and South Americans who walked thousands of miles to get away from the futility of their lives to do as so many millions of Europeans and Asians have already done – come to the promise of liberty that is America.

When there were quotas against certain European countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, folk tales told of the horde of Italians who swam into NYC.

No matter the dangers, failures, disappointments, prejudices and even fatalities that people have faced coming here, they have always come to this nation – and to no other.

Whether America can ever find the means of doing what no other world power in history has done – regain its absolute productive power and status – that promise in the Declaration of Independence remains and establishes this nation for all time as absolutely unique in history.

That promise exists in an immigrant who came to our shores from France in 1886 and has become the symbol of liberty. She stands tall at the entrance to America her face serene, holding that promise in one arm as her other arm reaches high with the beacon of liberty always lit.

She carries at her base our offering “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled mases yearning to breathe free”.

And she is green.