Revive the Revolution

What started as a summer of hope and opening (hopening?) has become more narrow and bleak, as if the incinerating heat of July has bleached optimism from me as it bleaches green from our yard. The Fourth was particularly poignant this year, as Aden, William and I discussed our mixed emotions around our embattled country.

As any parent, teacher or coach knows, it's hard to watch a family-, class-, or team-member stumble; it's painful for the one who falters as well as for the whole group. In the same way, it's painful to witness our country's missteps around containment of the coronavirus, shocking to watch the blatant acts of racism committed on our streets, humbling to recognize that we have grown up with, and are part of, systemic injustices.

One headline gripped me as I wrestled with the Fourth, practically rippled across my web browser like an inspired banner: "Let's Finish the American Revolution. Our nation's founding was a mess of contradictions. We must push America closer to its ideals." (Finish American Revolution.)  In a powerful op-ed for the New York Times, Timothy Egan wrote that "it will take an imaginative projection of  the best instincts" of our nation's founders to help re-create a shared narrative for our nation, one that speaks to the high aims of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and understands the flaws that their authors - and our nation - embodied.

Egan lists some of the contradictions in our founding fathers. Nine presidents held slaves, and only one (Washington) freed them all in his will. Roosevelt warred against Native Americans but evolved, says Egan, to become the first to add universal health care to the list of our fundamental rights (another right not recognized, but that's another blog). Jefferson, a slave-holder, wrote "all men are created equal." He may not have lived the truth expressed in that phrase, but perhaps now it's time - and our turn - to embrace this biblical belief and make it real.

As Senator Tammy Duckworth said in her powerful editorial response to Tucker Carlson's baseless  accusation that she lacked patriotism: "...while we have never been a perfect union, we have always sought to be a more perfect union -- and in order to do so, we cannot whitewash our missteps and mistakes. We must learn from them instead." (NYT Duckworth)

Since its inception our country has sustained a tension between the vision of what it wanted to be - what it could be - and the difficult and painful realities of its existence, predicated on the robbery of land from native inhabitants and the slave labor of people brought here in chains. Now is our chance to finish the revolution, to revive not only our vision for our country but our concrete plans to make those dreams reality.