A few of you have read an earlier version of this admittedly long essay. As The Daily Kos calls submissions to its pages diary entries, I will take those who publish this voice of reason at their word and resubmit a full-blown diary/journal rumination.
Although I am a guy who enjoys his personal space and his privacy, I also enjoy the company of close friends, good conversation, and fine wine. As I cannot have these things with you, readers, I will do the next best thing: share a personal spiritual journey that begins in the 1960s and winds its way through the sometimes dark woods until it reaches these uncertain days.
I plead guilty to my sometimes being long-winded and pedantic, although I prefer detail-oriented and pedagogic. I also plead guilty to my sometimes painting with a broad-brush, but without our ability to make generalizations, where would we be. I only hope that some, if not several, of my generalizations have validity. Intellectual integrity is a much larger goal.
I am alternately personal and universal, perhaps too small or too large, in what I attempt, but my only way of dealing with contemporary events is to put them under the lens of history and to apply them, if possible, to my own experiences.
Thus, I need you, fellow readers of The Daily Kos, to lend me your time for a while--a long while, it seems. This is my conversation with you, minus your ability to provide immediate face-to-face feedback. And, minus the good wine.
Please comment. Please critique. Please enjoy if you can.
Despite the “better angels” of my nature, I often found myself in church on Sunday morning: greeting members of the congregation with a handshake, contributing to the collection plate with a ten dollar bill, complimenting the clergyman with a fine word for his sermon, and even bowing my head with apparent piety--all without revealing myself as an infidel and bursting into flames. I went to church hung-over, half-asleep, and anxious about a high school or college assignment waiting on my desk at home or in the dormitory. Sitting, standing, or kneeling, I developed this inconvenient habit because attending church was what small town people like me did. Over the years, however, I came to regard my time among the pious not as nourishment for my soul, but as indigestion for my intellect.
From my late teens forward, I felt relieved, as did Huckleberry Finn, after the “soul-butter and hogwash” of the service had come to an end. In high school, I had to detox after church, eating my lunch--in the country we still called it dinner--while suffering from a case of soul burn. I was both angry and guilty: angry because of the time I had wasted trying to fit in with the faithful and guilty because I felt that I was missing something that every other person in the congregation seemed to be getting. One part of me, that part that longed for acceptance, ached every Sunday because the other part of me, that part that was burgeoning intellectually, had begun to suspect that church was nothing more than a ritual to compose the fearful, to appease the self-righteous, and to manipulate the not-very-smart.
My giving up religious observances was not the result of a secular epiphany achieved after long hours of study and meditation. Rather, I stopped going to church on a whim, simply because I did not want to endure another hour “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” During my sophomore year at college, I was all about jettisoning social obligations that had nearly suffocated me during high school, church attendance preeminent among them.
Although I was far from mature, far from making wise decisions, and far from channeling my energies to achieve worthy goals, I believe that I became a little saner on that long ago Sunday.
I had begun to follow no “drummer” other than the one I heard. The music was “far away,” but what I brought back because of my following it--even if I came back empty-handed--would be mine alone.
I believed in our nation’s conscience and our nation’s future. I believed that the journey I began when I was emancipated from my adolescence and was free to make my own decisions was the birthright of every American. I believed that we were all seeking the same thing: a safe, more humane future. I believed in energetic debates and principled compromises, conducted in the spirit of our Founding Fathers at the Continental Congress and later at the Constitutional Convention. I even believed that the people in those church pews that I had abandoned could play a vibrant role in the great experiment called America.
I was idealistic. I was naïve. I was dead wrong.
Rather than our dreaming that America into existence, we have awakened to a national horror story, one in which the dogma-driven strive to purge--brutally--the last vestiges of idealism, one in which the dogma-driven tolerate no opposition, and one in which the dogma-driven have enflamed a ferocious nationalism that can be maintained only by demonizing and destroying enemies. The dogma-driven jump-started their Blitzkrieg by arousing visceral hatred for our President. Now, their hatred goes far beyond a black president with a Harvard law degree.
They hate rational thought. They hate compromise. They hate diversity.
They hate democracy itself.
Perhaps the America in which I vested my energy and my hope was never more than a myth, never more than wishful thinking, never more than the kind of dream that is the privilege of youth. Perhaps I simply lacked the courage to look with steely, unblinking eyes at my community, my church, and even my family.
Principled conservatives, to say nothing of compassionate conservatives, have always been as rare as unicorns. But, dogma-driven fanatics are very real. Their tribal fury entered the body politic because an inattentive electorate permitted the 2010 mid-term election debacle to occur. Then, in 2012 and 2014, this same unreliable electorate exacerbated the madness, giving the gift of incumbency to a lynch mob of political vigilantes.
No longer considered outside the mainstream, these extremists have become spokespersons for the folks in my little town. They dislike giving health care to children, want to control women’s private lives, deny indisputable scientific facts, believe that our president is not an American, and--by golly--even castrate hogs.
If I desired an audience with an all-American Christian soldier--and I certainly do not--all I would have to do is return to my little church for a Sunday service. There, I would find the banality of extremism in its simplest form: a congregation smiling, singing, praying, and shaking their heads because a renegade black president has lead their nation far astray. These dowdy grandmas selling baked goods, these down-to-earth grandpas wearing out-of-style suits, and these fresh-faced youngsters anticipating their first missionary trip--a group straight from Hollywood Casting, posing for a Norman Rockwell print of small town anywhere--hide a dark secret behind their drab exterior.
If this seemingly innocuous scene were filmed in high definition, the enhanced resolution would reveal not kindly bumpkins, but religious authoritarians, whose only grievance is that freedom has been extended to people who do not look like them, who do not think like them, who do not live like them, and--if our nation is lucky--who will never want to be like them.
Make no mistake. These homespun church-goers are in the front lines of the cultural wars. In fact, they are the storm troopers. In them, the fanaticism and intolerance of our nation’s pious ancestors lives on, waiting silently and patiently until it is called forth to punish a new heresy. The stench of the stake and the chill of the dungeon are in their religious DNA. They make no apology for their mundane bludgeoning of truth or their humdrum eviscerating of decency.
Nevertheless, if we call those who worship at “the little white church in the vale” hypocrites, we are mistaken. If we call their well-heeled brethren who worship at plush suburban temples hypocrites, we are even more mistaken. Yes, their insufferable sense of moral superiority is repellant, and it does seem at odds with the higher principles of their faith, but there is nothing hypocritical about them.
The dogma-driven elite are sincere, as their pursuit of power through the manipulation of the uneducated and the unsophisticated is justified by their assumption that command of others is their birthright. Their agenda is consistent with their concept of divine law. Only the privileged can lead. The closer one is to being a caesar, the closer one is to being a god among the insatiably power-hungry.
The dogma-driven masses are sincere, as their fear and loathing of those who are different from them has been transformed into a doctrine that sacrifices rational thought and individuality. Their agenda is consistent with their concept of divine law. Only the God-fearing can be saved. The closer one is to being an automaton, the closer one is to being an angel among the incurably simple-minded.
As a result, the dogma-driven, whether elite or common, are exactly what they appear to be-- bland, smug, hard, and terrifying--not in spite of their faith, but because of it.
Television evangelists proclaim that the faithful have been transformed into supermen endowed with special gifts, such as talking in tongues or healing the sick. Faith, as it was for the Puritans, is a license for the saved to measure the worthiness of their fellow human beings.
Only recently, I learned from an evangelical preacher that the saved can detect non-believers simply by listening for tell-tale differences in speech patterns. Gifted Christians like these really must find time in their busy calendars--already filled with the business of holy tyranny--to attend the next Thought Police talent search. This exemplar of Christian virtue has been a Dittohead for twenty-five years and refers to President Obama only as “Hussein.”
I have also discovered that many faithful are predators who welcome a holy war. When a particularly devout colleague returned from a weekend retreat, she blithely reported that the presiding bishop proclaimed he would die in bed, his successor would die in prison, and that man’s successor would die fighting in the streets. When I replied that no one wants a holy war, she remained silent--God’s faithful do not question proclamations made by a maniac if he is wearing a clerical collar. As the year was 2012 and a black interloper was running for his second term, I did not bother to ask against whom these bishops--these “defenders of the faith”--would be fighting.
Over the years, I have had a variety of interactions with the sanctimonious, those who hate collective bargaining, voting rights, gender equity, gay marriage, artistic expression, critical thought, and scientific evidence--all with equal fervor. Sometimes, I have been the uncomfortable recipient of prayers to guide me. More often, I have been the unhappy recipient of threats to scare me.
If I disagreed, even mildly and politely, with a particularly egregious remark, such as homosexuality’s being a sin, I was cut short with a calm, icy retort from the depths of sanctimony: “Your argument is not with me. It’s with the Lord Jesus Christ.” Then, with the hauteur only God’s chosen can manifest, the righteous would saunter back to Jesus Land, leaving me to smolder in my sins.
Even if I had been given the opportunity to mourn the gay teens and young adults who have committed suicide because they were confused, frightened, and abandoned, these powerful Christians--enflamed by their holiness--would not have wasted a tear on such benighted youngsters, in their eyes nothing more than acceptable loses in the cultural war.
The truth is that wanna-be martyrs with a persecution complex do not die. The truth is that pontificating cowards in cassocks do not die. Rather, young suicides are the genuine martyrs of the cultural wars. Theirs is a problem from which the faithful coldly avert their eyes. Theirs is a silent death that occurs in dormitories, in schools, and in homes, not while fighting in imaginary street battles against manufactured enemies, but while struggling to come to terms with the fact that parishioners, neighbors and even family members have dropped them off at the gates of hell to die alone.
Theirs is not a sacrifice of faith, but a sacrifice to faith--the faith of remorseless demagogues.
This appallingly undemocratic tradition of moral superiority was brought to the New World by Puritan immigrants long before the United States of America was an embryonic idea. Contrary to fairy tales in dumbed-down history books, the Puritans were neither proponents of religious freedom nor advocates of benevolent government. Salvation was bestowed only on God’s elect, the Puritan community. As a result of their exalted status, the Puritans were on a mission from God. Ideals such as tolerance, compassion, and forgiveness played no role in their crusade to suppress heresy. In the beginning, God in the New World did not yield enlightenment, but generations of theocratic persecution.
Puritan John Winthrop was hell-bent--so to speak--on building a city upon a hill, where, with God’s blessing, the righteous would prosper. All the world would admire their exceptional status among nations and their special favor in the eyes of God. Such a utopian vision brooks no blemish on its pristine surface. Blemishes reveal vulnerability. Blemishes suggest that innate superiority, such as being God’s elect, is a myth.
For people with no interest in equality or objectivity, strict adherence to a severe code of thought and behavior was the path to salvation. Only by separating the goats from the lambs would the New World remain pure, sinless, and worthy. Only by keeping the elect upon the hill would the New World remain exceptional.
When the Puritan toxicity on the hill was forced to yield its hegemony to a more diverse population with more worldly goals, those who still had faith in humanity’s oldest religion-- authoritarian rule by a ruthless minority--turned to new allies, emerging political and economic systems, to maintain their stranglehold on power. True democracy may have had a better chance in the world of our nation’s Founders than it ever did in the world of the Puritans, but it seems that the America nation could not function without oppression and exploitation.
In the end, there is little choice between religious zealots, slave owners, and ruthless merchants.
If the Puritan elect spun the Bible to their advantage, creating a rigid theocracy to safeguard their utopia, then a new financial elite spun economic theories to their advantage, creating laissez-faire capitalism to safeguard their privilege. American religion, an inexhaustible purveyor of tyranny, and American capitalism, an inexhaustible purveyor of wealth, could combine as never before to protect the nation’s merchants, industrialists, and plantation owners, who now occupied the city upon the hill.
From the earliest days of the American nation, oppressed populations, who produced the nation’s wealth, were not accorded the minimal decencies commensurate with personhood. When the Constitution of the United States referred to “We the people,” they were not among the We. Nor were they among the people. In short, they were not among the 1% for whom all benefits--spiritual or secular--existed. Winthrop’s city upon the hill, now under new management, was still dispensing injustice with full vigor.
As the burgeoning American nation developed further, new generations of elites--modern, scientific, educated in the tenents of selfishness espoused by William Graham Sumner and much later, Ayn Rand--rationalized that the world was turning out not only as it should, but as it must. The American business community’s increasing wealth and power, their natural right as elites, allowed them to build an infrastructure of privilege that shielded them from contact with the poor, the weak, and the inferior. The tenants of the city upon the hill may have changed once again, but their message of oppression and exploitation was unwavering.
Their disdain for democracy was palpable.
In the twenty-first century, elites prefer republic to democracy when they describe the American system of government. Apparently, a republic provides layers of protection against genuine rule by the people. These layers of protection manifest themselves in the doctrine of states’ rights--a cesspool policy that delivers a carte blanche for pockets of recalcitrance and reaction to thrive within the country, resisting efforts by the national government to ameliorate their detrimental effects. Rather than their preferring to live in the United States of America, the elites and the yokels in these oppressive pockets prefer living in the Balkanized States of America, where long-discredited thought processes are preserved as odious traditions.
More than one hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, elites and their cracker-barrel allies still evoke nullification of federal laws, especially those that seek to control guns or to protect same-sex marriage. Passing themselves off as Constitutional scholars, these unreconstituted confederates want nothing more than to wrest power from an illegitimate, America-hating black president. They have a cover for their treason, however, and that cover is faith. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, promoted by Indiana’s light-weight governor and Republican vice-presidential candidate, Mike Pence, is an embarrassing example of nullification backed by religious bigots like the folks in my little town.
America’s proponents of irresponsible government--religious leaders, political leaders, and business leaders who ignore the disadvantaged until an election year when they can disparage them as welfare queens--are spiritual brothers to the Inner Party of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. They can double-think like champion authoritarians, embracing the Declaration of Independence or the United States Constitution in the guise of guardians, all the while distorting the democratic potential of these documents and hating their every noble word.
As a consequence, the positions of the dogma-driven on the most significant issues of the twenty-first century resemble the ultimatums of a playground bully more than the judicious policies of a statesman. The mainstream media spends a disproportionate amount of time covering political candidates who spew venom with impunity because such reporting is good theater, while ignoring the plight of millions because such reporting is ho-hum.
What of this invisible America? What of those God did not choose for heaven or nature did not place on third base when they were born? Outside the infrastructure of privilege, how do those about whom Ayn Rand’s disciples speak with such naked disdain actually live?
They live without good schools, without decent jobs, without satisfactory housing, and without adequate health care. If lead were to leach from pipes, contaminate their water supply, and ruin their children’s health, what does it matter? In the eyes of our Puritan ancestors, these unfortunates were the damned. In the eyes of Ayn Rand, these unfortunates are a sub-species.
The elite have argued, “Why waste time, resources, and empathy on those who are already doomed?” The world is full of chattel rejected by God and by nature whom the privileged must subjugate and employ in tasks beneficial to capital. Work them in the hot sun, grind them to dust, reduce them to machinery. Relegate them to rural slums, or shovel them into urban ghettos. Permit them to live long enough to produce another generation without hope. In short, find a way to make their wretchedness work for you. This is the only noblesse oblige a devotee of Ayn Rand acknowledges: a dark and merciless American doppelganger of the original French ideal for compassionate citizenship.
You need not be a theologian or a political scientist to understand what made Paul Ryan smirk during President Obama’s empowering State of the Union Address: Innate superiority. Disdain for compassion. Contempt for the Commander in Chief. I see no contradiction between Paul Ryan’s conducting a love affair with Ayn Rand and his being a practicing Catholic. Indeed, Ryan is the epitome of religious and secular privilege, a perfect dogma-driven elite with allegiance to “an outworn creed” and a scorpion’s empathy for the disadvantaged.
His affiliation with the self-proclaimed one true faith permits Ryan to smirk at any community organizer with a degree from Harvard Law School. His all-American background--a fifth-generation Wisconsinite who once had the honor of driving the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile--qualifies Ryan to display for television his superiority to a man raised by a single mother on food stamps. Seeing the ironic reversal of superior and subordinate, a standard device in Shakespearean comedy, Paul Ryan must have been suppressing a laugh to hear an imposter, masquerading as the President of the United States, deliver a national address that he believes will someday--soon--be his to deliver. Assuredly, had Ryan been at the podium, his State of the Union Address would have been a paean to privilege, at which former Speaker of the House John Boehner, overcome by emotion, would have cried.
Paul Ryan is not the first to proclaim his faith while spewing malice and devouring his victims with a ferocity that would make Hannibal Lecter blush with shame. Just listen to pugnacious Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League in the United States, harangue about enemies of the faith or to smiling Tim Dolan, Archbishop of New York, expound on a theology forged in the Dark Ages and violently at odds with a modern democracy born in the Enlightenment. Donohue may harangue, Dolan may lecture, and Ryan may smirk, but they are amateurs, mere tub-thumpers, compared to beatified heavy Thomas More, best known for his portrayal as a principled statesman in Robert Bolt’s fictive drama, A Man for All Seasons. A thoroughly different portrayal of Thomas More appears in Hilary Mantel’s historical novel Wolf Hall, in which this saint is a religious extremist, a political schemer, and a tormentor of heretics.
The fact that Thomas More wore a hair shirt next to his skin and occasionally flagellated himself calls into question his alleged sanity. Further, More’s direct involvement in the imprisonment, torture, and execution of those who dared to read the New Testament in English calls into question his alleged humanity, much less his humanism. A notable example of More’s attitude toward heretics was the glee he expressed at the ghastly image of John Tewksbury being burned alive for possession of an illegal Bible. Sir Thomas further rejoiced that Tewksbury would continue to burn in the fires of hell for all eternity.
A good summary of this saint--and of the religious extremists who revere him--is provided by the British historical biographer Jasper Ridley: “a particularly nasty sadomasochistic pervert.”
The pact between the dogma-driven elite and the folks in Jesus Land--an unholy alliance intent on bringing progressives to justice in God’s Doomsday Court--may not be sadomasochistic, although it could be argued that all religions are symptomatic of sadomasochism, but it is particularly nasty. The faithful in my little town need to feel that they are soldiers in a just war. In their universe, Christians must always have enemies. If not Godless communists, then anyone who is dedicated to empowering political and economic outsiders so that they can lead dignified lives and bring their voices to the national conversation.
For the dogma-driven, tolerance, inclusiveness, and egalitarianism have always been hazardous because they encourage citizens to see their leaders as equals, not as superiors. In that case--alas and alack--Winthrop’s pristine city upon a hill would become just another city--one among many--built from the same mud in which the privileged have long forced the disadvantaged to live.
Dangerous stuff, this democracy.
No wonder the dogma-driven have mustered their lackeys in Jesus Land to fight it. At this very moment, the faithful of my little town are murdering wildlife while using semi-automatic assault rifles, eating greasy hamburgers while listening to Rush Limbaugh, or drinking black coffee from Fox News mugs while swapping I hate Barack Obama jokes, slapping their knees with glee when one of them tells a particularly malicious or sadistic joke.
After the 2004 presidential election, progressives on the national news disparaged the electorate that had voted George W. Bush back into office. They did not understand this militantly ignorant, rock-solid block of so-called “values voters.” They could voice only incredulity and disdain. Having lived in Jesus Land all my life, I am repulsed, but no longer shocked, by the extremes to which these excremental fanatics will go to prosecute their case against reason itself. In the summer of 2016, I have witnessed the depths to which these opponents of decency have sunk.
In a small Midwestern city that hosts a world-class university--despite the fact that its current president is a union-busting, non-academic extremist--I have often driven by a hand-made sign that reads, “Obama likes to kill babies.” Coming back from a family reunion, I was again struck by the viciousness close to home. In crude letters, a sign in my wife’s hometown exhorts citizens to “Lynch Obama.” At a minor league baseball game, shortly after the shootings of African Americans in Minnesota and Louisiana and the assassinations of police officers in Dallas and Orlando, my wife saw a T-shirt that expresses the casual insanity of the Jesus Land crowd. On its front, the shirt depicts a Bible and a rifle with the caption “Two Things Every American Should Know.” On its back, the shirt declares, “Neither Is Taught in School.”
Perhaps it is comforting for many progressives to marginalize these instances of hostility as isolated examples of fringe lunacy. Perhaps it is comforting for many progressives to feel privileged because Jesus Land is fly-over country they do not call home. In my redneck of the woods, however, such brutal sentiments are not considered lunatic or fringe.
Such slogans appear on signs that pop up like toadstools in the shabby yards of the poorly educated, but they also appear in the manicured lawns of seemingly innocuous church-going folks. These denizens of Jesus Land love God, guns, and guts with irrational intensity.
Their God and their guns are well-protected by rabid congregations and National Rifle Association thugs, but the guts have always belonged to someone else. Perhaps they are the severed limbs or the damaged brains of young soldiers, shipped off to Iraq and Afghanistan, while cheerleaders of death hide behind their signs back in Jesus Land. Perhaps they are the bodies of school children, cut to pieces by military-style weapons, while gun-lovers sit at home and stroke their Glocks. Perhaps they are the members of the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, slaughtered in their sanctuary, while those who display Confederate flags revel in their homicidal heritage.
In their minds, the citizens of Jesus Land are experiencing a Don’t Tread on Me moment, doubling-down on their war against all things rational. The Overlords of Jesus Land have manipulated them for decades and have infused their primitive culture with a knee-jerk hatred for the dreaded “other.” These Christian militias of hatred view themselves as the last, best hope to prevent the overthrow of Western civilization by people who just might expand freedom to include more than angry bigots.
The Overlords of Jesus Land--whose latest opportunistic incarnation is Donald Trump--are not threatened by barbarians at the gate, anticipating the burning, looting, and raping that they will enjoy once they have broken down the walls of civilization. Rather, the Overlords of Jesus Land are the barbarians inside the gate, anticipating their pouring boiling oil over the walls onto visitors below, who are armed only with creativity, individuality, and diversity. Casting these pearls of human achievement before Christian swine may well provoke pious hogs to trample the pearls underfoot and to tear the bringers of the pearls to pieces.
Dogma-driven-elites are far from stupid, but their allies in Jesus Land are stupid and dangerous: dangerous to our democracy, dangerous to our nation, and dangerous to our world. They are a bubbling, seething mass extinction event for Western civilization. To adapt a well-known pearl from John Stuart Mill to my purposes: Although it is not true that all religious people are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are religious.
Martin Luther King, Jr. best expresses the danger posed by unholy yokels, whose irrational, inexhaustible hatred has been stoked to its kindling point and launched against progress like a Tomahawk missile: Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. Today, a volatile mixture of brazenly power-hungry demagogues and perpetually aggrieved, stridently irrational voters has turned America into a vial of nitroglycerin, sitting precariously on a powder keg. Lovers of all things apocalyptic, the narcissistic and the sanctimonious have created a political pornography that is the antithesis of democracy, all in the name of “taking back” their imaginary country.
If Donald Trump’s harangues to mobs of “black souls”--Second Amendment Christians with hare-brain minds and hare-trigger tempers--were rated for the danger they pose to our nation’s moral compass they would be a hard XXX. Those who insist that Donald Trump is an aberration who does not reflect the views of the Republican Party are the worst kind of hypocrites, and those who believe this lie are the worst kind of dupes.
The rise of the Alt Right is neither unexpected nor unintentional. Extremist groups do not assume seats at America’s political roundtable without their being spawned in the cafes and churches of my little town, their being nurtured in the darkest corners of the Internet, and their being condoned, if not coddled, by a major political party. Silence by the Republican leadership during Donald Trump’s birther attacks on President Obama suggests more than their cowardice. It screams their approval. The maxim of the law is Qui tacet consentiret.
All of this occurred long before the Alt Right’s summons to the national stage by shrill dog whistles from an egomaniacal Fascist, running for president as a Republican.
What a surprise!
Not coincidentally, David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network and the Daily Signal sees a correlation between Trump’s taking “hits for his boldness” and Evangelicals taking “hits from society for their biblical boldness.” It is a time-honored tradition for cowards to play the victim when confronted with their crimes, ever since the Old Testament murderer Cain whined, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
It should be noted that 78% of white Evangelical Christians support Donald Trump, despite his woeful religious and biblical illiteracy. Hiding their antipathy for human freedom and for initiatives that have the promise to unleash it behind a tenuous political label, these polarizing, moralizing, gun-toting nationalists are intent on preserving a way of life that is wildly unpopular in our democracy, although the only evidence of a credible threat to their lunacy-as-lifestyle movement exists in their white-hot rhetoric.
A perpetual source of white noise in our nation is the Right’s complaint that their freedom is being stolen. Soon, these apocalyptic prophets proclaim, all freedoms will be gone. What freedom has been lost? They still have the freedom to circle the wagons in churches and cathedrals and to spew toxic nonsense into the nation’s intellectual climate. They still have the freedom to malign LGBTs, racial minorities, women, intellectuals, and the enemies du jour-- immigrants, especially women and children fleeing violent homelands, and Gold Star parents like Khizr and Ghazala Kahn. They still have the freedom to establish a propaganda outlet so ruthlessly that it should have Reich as its last name. While innocents die, they still have the freedom to stock-pile weapons in preparation for the inevitable race war, the arrival of the black helicopters, or President Obama’s revealing himself as the anti-Christ--whichever long-anticipated calamity comes first.
Often at great personal risk, secular saints have struggled to free human thought from the Unholy Trinity of ignorance, superstition and fear. When these factors are eliminated, what remains, as Sherlock Holmes says, “Must be the truth.” It is upon these fragments of “what remains” that humanity has endeavored to build a rational world, a just world, and a compassionate world. In contrast, the dogma-driven have fashioned a bizarro, alternate universe in which science does not exist, individuality is not permitted, and empathy is anathema.
From Christians torching the Great Library of Alexandria, to obstreperous Right-Wing putschists goose-stepping their way from Cleveland to our nation’s capital, the field of battle has always been in the realm of knowledge. If thugs armed with the cudgel of passionate ignorance have attacked knowledge wherever and whenever they can find it, then the first priority for those of us who do not welcome a return to an authoritarian theocracy is to establish bulwarks from which to defend and dispense knowledge, much of which has cost the lives of high-minded individuals who sacrificed everything in the service of truth.
Only then can we build the America we dreamt once and glimpse still in our moments of national lucidity.
One bulwark must be public--never private--institutions of higher learning. Public institutions of higher learning must be centers of knowledge, in which classic texts from diverse disciplines are stored, studied, and created. If academics encourage their students to study these texts, to make these texts themselves, and to use these texts to expand human knowledge, then those who hate knowledge will realize the dangers presented by an authentic education and will move to destroy it. Too often, the dogma-driven have crippled or discredited genuine teaching and learning, thus minimizing the damage knowledge can do, all as part of the disingenuous crusade for educational reform.
Learning on the high school level has often been hijacked by dogma-driven school boards, far more interested in indoctrinating than in educating. Preparing students to be the trustees of democracy by immersing them in noble thoughts has never been on their agenda. Conversely, in my little town, high school seniors were given copies of J. Edgar Hoover’s Masters of Deceit by the paternalistic guardians of mind-control on the school board, kindly church-going farmers who would pray for you, as long as you hated truth, justice, and Democrats.
The standardized test industry, payola to the loyal supporters of extremist politicians, presents a paradigm for the worst form of dumbed-down education, all the while holding it up as a miracle of accountability in America’s classrooms. In truth, it is education by misdirection. Real education is messy and potentially dangerous to the status quo. If it is misdirected into standardized tests that have no content and measure nothing or if it is eliminated entirely--killing it at the source by replacing history with fairy tales, literature with propaganda, and science with religion--then, for the enemies of genuine education, America’s schools are doing something.
Genuine education--the kind that challenges assumptions, encourages critical thinking, and changes lives--has been pushed aside for harmless fluff. The dogma-driven prefer to have America’s students preparing for standardized tests ad nauseum, rather than their reading discerningly, thinking critically, and writing perceptively.
In the rural high school where I taught for 36 years, students were not permitted to watch President Obama’s beginning of the school year address to the nation. Nor could they consult un-American sources to write research papers. Nor could they read immoral books. Nor were they taught evolution. But, they began each day with the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by a moment of silence, and they could play to their hearts’ content in the robotics labs for which the school corporation paid big bucks.
One group of enterprising youngsters built a robot that could curse in German (Fick dich!) and then Flip the Bird (Klappen Sie den Vogel). The other group of students in the lab across the hall from my classroom built a robot that could move forward and backward when they pushed buttons on the remote control.
The enterprising youngsters may have had a promising future in our nation’s diplomatic corps. Their less-talented classmates may have had a future building R2 D2’s stunt doubles.
Either group could have interviewed to become the next Siri.
Neither group had been prepared to become the caretakers of democracy.
At the university from which I earned my master’s degree, the president has tried to stamp out textbooks he does not approve, notably Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of The United States, while exercising his own academic freedom by walking away from speeding violations near the university campus. Public institutions of higher learning must not be hamstrung by non-academics like this charlatan, who displayed his own level of scholarship by calling Zinn’s masterpiece “truly execrable” and “crap.”
Domination by dogma-driven elites--college presidents from the authoritarian Right, who crusade against scholarship, or willfully obtuse school boards from the cornfields, who impose their horrific agenda on high schools students--need not be inevitable. Citizens can be militant in the cause of education if they believe an injustice is being done to their sons and daughters. A recent example of the dogma-driven being overthrown is the Jefferson County, Colorado recall of three hostile schoolboard members in November 2015.
Backed by the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, the biggest collection of gangster capitalists since Al Capone held serve in Chicago, the Teabaggers on the schoolboard took a couple of vicious swipes at the teaching staff before their hubris crossed the line. Their agenda was to overhaul the school district’s Advanced Placement United States History class to ensure that it promoted patriotism, free enterprise, and individual rights. As a reaction to this attempted remake of the curriculum by extremists, a coalition of students, teachers, and parents--who believed that education, rather than indoctrination, is the only mandate appropriate for a public school--knocked on 100,000 doors and ousted the Wing-Nut trio.
This election may be viewed as an aberration or as a harbinger, but it demonstrates that reasonable people can win and that they are often the majority. Extremists--when exposed for what they are and challenged by an informed electorate--can be defeated. Not always. Not uniformly. Nevertheless, the movement to restore and to defend authentic education in America’s public institutions of higher learning has awakened.
Of course institutions of higher learning must prepare students for the future, but to define that future narrowly as job training does not serve the needs of a democracy. If knowledge--both its depth and breadth--is a bulwark against extremism, then turning universities into trade schools serves no interests other than those of extremists, who want to suppress knowledge, or those of their countrified allies, who are too stupid to recognize it or to learn from it.
I used to tell my students that my goal was to produce liberal arts majors who could solve problems like engineers and engineers who could write like liberal arts majors. I did not ask for uniformity of thought. Rather, I asked for clarity of thought. Although that does not sound like much, my students, who had seldom been challenged in this fashion, appreciated the opportunity I offered. If nothing else, my class beat studying the same grammar that had been pounded into their heads since middle school or reading a classic novel as nothing more than a formulaic exercise in identifying plot, setting, character, and theme.
I did not try to change minds, but I hoped to broaden them.
The dogma-driven do not ask how or why they know what they espouse. Not for one moment do they question whether their so-called truth is so inviolable that it must be imposed on others against their will. Public institutions of higher learning will never change these extremists or cause them to lay down their pitch forks, but public education, if it is protected and allowed to do what it does best, may empower enough rational citizens so that they can quarantine fanatics, while the nation goes forward to forge “a more perfect union” without them.
Whereas a quality system of public education is a priority for democracy, a benefit for the educated is their ability to enjoy a quality of life that is not available to the indoctrinated. Much harder to quantify than the curriculum of an Advanced Placement United States History class, an educated life enables those who enjoy it to draw upon a wide range of disciplines--an internal library so rich in its resources that fanatics cannot keep pace. Although demagogues have always preferred “the murderous, cowardly pack” as their weapon of choice, an educated life is our nation’s heritage, an American birthright that can be passed from generation to generation like a priceless heirloom--an organic treasure, always expanding, always evolving, and always fresh for a new generation of leaders.
This is democracy’s bulwark against fanatics who are eager to impose an intellectual death sentence on our nation. Those with the capacity and the audacity to think for themselves will never be a mob, but in an ironic reversal of the castle doctrine, they will protect knowledge in places where zealots dare not tread.
The pleasure of reading books that I treasure, listening to fine music that I love, associating with companions that I respect, and forming my own opinions without coercion or censure--these are the unalienable rights of an educated life, made possible if our nation’s schools reward curiosity and promote mental flexibility.
As an undergraduate in that long-ago world of young adulthood, I had the good fortune to enjoy the company of scholars, who shared their knowledge because I desired it. Thanks to their simply being who they were--men and women of outstanding intellect and compassion--I developed an immune system to protect myself from extremist toxins and--to the extent that I have been given the privilege--to share my appreciation for humanity’s achievements, an appreciation that was bequeathed to me as a “gift outright.”
Even if I were admonished, even if I were threatened--even if I wished--I could not renounce the me that began to grow on that Sunday morning long ago, that followed a “different drummer,” and that formed an authentic self from the crucible of all my experiences.
To quote Invictus, the most empowering discovery I brought back from my following that “far away” music is that “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”
The congregants in my little church gain strength from their huddling together like cattle with their backs to the storm so that they can shed the rain. Unless all the cattle line-up uniformly, the herd will suffer. Imagine the faithful as cattle--not such a stretch--and you understand how they cannot tolerate a stray bull who does not heed the safety-in-numbers memo. When the storm abates, that bull is in trouble.
Despite my running the risk of censure from the herd, I have endeavored to live outside orthodoxy and dogma. Although my decisions have been influenced by political and social exigencies, they have also been idiosyncratic and eccentric, representing no one or nothing but myself. If I have chosen to be the bull who stands with his face to the storm, perhaps it is for no other reason than I want to see the storm.
I would be ungrateful to my mentors to think that these hard-won freedoms were made just for cranks like me. I would be self-indulgent to think that a cosmopolitan attitude can be developed only by those of us with gray hair. Nothing has validated my getting out of bed in the morning more than my seeing the wheel turn toward greater freedom for greater numbers--even in my rural high school.
When I arrived in the autumn of 1979, my rural high school was stuck somewhere between ignorance, intolerance, and cruelty. Ann Coulter’s playground taunt was tossed about with abandon, not rebuked by a feckless administration that lacked wisdom, courage, and honor. Before a semi-state basketball game against a predominately black opponent, students dressed in Ku-Klux Klan robes, and a fat agriculture teacher pranced about in black-face and a polka dot dress, parodying an African-American woman. The N-word, while never forbidden in my rural high school, was used with a new vehemence--the howl from the “murderous, cowardly pack,” unfettered from even a semblance of our shared humanity.
Many days I felt as if the stupidest boys in the junior high locker room were in charge, a group of bullies who found endless humor in flatulence and grew up to support Donald Trump.
When I retired 36 years later, I heard few sexual taunts or racial slurs being bandied about the hallways. Although I would have been foolish to think that all bigotry had vanished, the most impressive development in my rural high school, as my career wound down, was that a high-minded, level-headed, and wise-beyond-its-years tolerance had arisen among the students. My students taught me, not the other way around. To be relevant as an educator in their lives, I had to catch up to them. Thanks, Malia, Sasha, and many young adults like you for educating your father and for providing me with hope that the future need not repeat the mistakes of the past.
Today’s young adults, the Millennials, are an independent group, despite their being linked by social media as no other generation in history. Unaffiliated with a political party, they vote for progressive candidates. Distrustful of the established order, they favor an activist government. Unattached to religious dogma, they are optimistic about the future. Slow to marry themselves, they endorse gay marriage. In short, Millennials are difficult to classify.
The Millennials are not a movement. Rather, they are a silent revolution of cultural change, invisible until suddenly you find yourself living it. Not to sound like Bernie Sanders, but I trust the future to these young men and women. From the Millennials, I have learned that democracy’s best defense against authoritarians is for its citizens to value independence as their most precious birthright. Is it not possible to see the Millennials as the twenty-first century keepers of Jeffersonian Democracy?
Pragmatic but magnanimous, idealistic but skeptical, the Millennials effect change by showing up in irresistible numbers at school, on the job, or even for family gatherings.
They do not belong to me. For this, I respect them.
They do not belong to bigots, fanatics, or demagogues. For this, I love them.
They have begun their own generational journey to follow a “different drummer,” one that only they can hear. What they bring back from their following that “far away” music will be a unique discovery, one with the potential to build a more open, a more diverse, and a more humane
America.
Now, more than any other time in my memory, the Millennials must show up in irresistible numbers at the ballot box in November.
Although I retain some terminology employed by religious denominations--I still use words like moral and immoral or good and evil--I now look at how well our nation addresses human needs as my way of measuring these difficult-to-define concepts. I refuse to explain the world we share by resorting to religious gobbledygook. Like Huck Finn, when Miss Watson insists that he pray for “spiritual gifts,” I have not found gobbledygook to be relevant. It has no application to urgent human needs, whether those needs are hooks for Huck’s fish-line or a decent salary for America’s hard-working poor.
Gobbledygook like “spiritual gifts” has always been “too many for me.” Primary among human needs are health, safety, and freedom, without which no human life matters and with which every human life can possess dignity. An ideology, whether it is religious or political, either delivers these human needs or it does not. I have yet to see “spiritual gifts” buy a hungry child groceries, cure a disease, or prevent a war.
Do not preach that curiosity and intellect are the symptoms of our sinful nature inherited from Adam and Eve. Do not thank God for clement weather while miles away violent storms are destroying lives. Do not explain that the death of one child from cancer or leukemia is necessary for the world to function as it must.
Do not tell me that God is mysterious, that we must suffer His every whim, and that we must be grateful for His every failing.
In addition to their willingness to accept suffering--especially that of hundreds of millions who have not been born again--Christians have no motivation to preserve the only habitable planet we know because their Savior has proclaimed, “My kingdom is not of this world.” For the rabidly religious, for whom the ideal of common humanity is a contemptuous and sinful falsehood, faith offers a quick exit. Before conditions on earth get really bad, the faithful will be raptured, while the rest are left behind to face a period of tribulation.
Vice-President Al Gore should have listened. Instead of his spreading knowledge about the damage our planet has suffered at the hands of industrial elites, Mr. Gore should have abandoned the false gospel of environmental justice, genuflected at the feet of oil executives, and--most of all--hugged Jesus.
What about the unlucky souls who do not catch the Rapture Express to the clouds? Can you guess their identity?
If you guessed those that the Puritans persecuted, those that Thomas More burned, and those that Ayn Rand scorned, you guessed right.
To this list of “usual suspects,” we must add approximately 70% of the world’s population: the men, women, and children of our planet who are not Christians.
When I asked an Evangelical what hundreds of millions of people had done to deserve an eternity in hell, he countered with the axiom of all axioms: “They did not know the Lord Jesus Christ.”
“Most of them barely know who Jesus was. They know as much about Jesus as you know about Buddha,” I tried to reason.
“Buddha was not the Son of God,” he said with a gotcha smile.
I did not bother to mention that numerous historians, theologians, and Biblical scholars have suggested that the Jesus myth is not unique. Many have come to doubt whether an historical Jesus of Nazareth even existed.
The savior myth arose in many lands, among diverse people, centuries before Jesus. Savior figures, such as Horus, Krishna, Osiris, Mithra, and even Buddha, not only predate Jesus, but they also share a nearly identical story with him: a virgin birth, a band of devoted followers, a number of miracles, a return from the dead, and a promise to redeem humanity.
The Jesus myth takes place when numerous magicians, miracle-workers, and prophets prowled the Middle East. What’s more, the work of these charlatans continued apace long after Jesus is said to have died on the cross. As Richard Carrier, author of Sense and Goodness Without God, suggests, “In light of this picture, the tales of the Gospels do not seem very remarkable.”
Even more problematic, the Gospels were written years after the time of Jesus. The earliest Gospel of the evangelist known as Mark was written 40 years after Jesus allegedly walked the earth, and many of the eye-witnesses to Jesus’s ministry in the Gospels were born after Jesus was said to have been crucified and resurrected. Not a single contemporary writer--not Greek, not Roman, and not Hebrew--mentions Jesus of Nazareth as a man or as a messiah.
Compelling arguments can be made that the Hero of the Gospels is a fabrication: perhaps a propaganda tool for the Romans, perhaps the result of wishful thinking by an oppressed people, or perhaps the result of good story-telling being taken literally.
The stories of heroes as different as Prometheus, Moses, Gluskap, Fionn mac Cumhaill, and Da Yu all share elements of what Joseph Campbell calls the monomyth:
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
In this respect, Buddha--and Jesus--have a great deal in common with Sir Galahad, Frodo Baggins, and Luke Skywalker. Although I appreciate the exploits of these characters, I am not about to worship them. Nor will I shun, torture, kill, or condemn anyone to hell on their behalf. I have always believed that we root for the hero as someone who carries our aspirations to places we can never visit and who represents our best qualities when we are faced by a crisis.
A hero who, the faithful fervently believe, will smite innocent people, whose only crime was their being born in the wrong place and at the wrong time, is not deserving of our worship. A hero whose story was spread by ruthless opportunists such as Constantine, Clovis, and Charles “Bloody Verdict of Verden” the Great (Charlemagne) does not deserve to be called The Prince of Peace. Further, it is an understatement to say that centuries of corruption by the Vatican have done little to bolster the image of Christianity.
Not to be glib, but I must quote Jethro Tull:
If Jesus saves, then he’d better save himself, from the gory glory-seekers, who would use his name in death.
If Buddha is not the Son of God, there is reason to believe that neither is Jesus.
My problem with faith in Mr. Arbitrary Tyrant is articulated by Epicurus over 2,300 years ago:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?
Epicurus’s trilemma is a response to a world filled with natural disasters and human suffering on a scale so immense that if such devastation were attributable to a king, the populace would have reason to dethrone and prosecute him. Nevertheless, those being buffeted by the random horrors of human life are told that all is well because an omnipotent and omnibenevolent King is responsible for their misery. Such logic escapes me.
Humanity deserves a better narrative, one that breaks free from the bondage of religious lunacy. I believe that the Epicureans are the first truly modern thinkers because their creed is clean. No need to propitiate a deity. No need to be held hostage by a doctrine that threatens eternal damnation. No need to accept a world that is supernatural, rather than natural. Their philosophy is a bulwark of elegant reason to prevent the forces of religious extremism from running rampant.
This narrative appears in the Roman poet Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura). Its discovery and re-birth, is re-counted in Stephen Goldblatt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Swerve: How the World Became Modern: a celebration of the Renaissance as a victory for wonder, reason, and discovery over religiosity, dogma, and repression. These vibrant forces, unleased after centuries of slumber in a barbaric medieval prison, reinvigorated the world and ultimately led to greater freedom for greater numbers.
Freedom is the ability to conduct authentic, personal investigations of the world without having to make sacrifices to desert gods or to seek the approval of authoritarians who are motivated to keep humanity in a state of weakness and ignorance. These personal investigations lead to science, the most dynamic and most democratic of disciplines. In periods of discovery, such as the Age of Pericles, the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment, knowledge grows at an exponential rate. Superstitions--centuries old--fall away to reveal limitless possibilities.
A swerve in the structure of society necessarily follows, moving humanity closer to democracy and justice. Government evolves from an aristocracy, an oligarchy, or a theocracy--imposed by the powerful and sanctioned by corrupt religious institutions--to become a contract made by free people so that they can “secure the blessings of liberty.”
Existential philosophy speaks of freedom, responsibility, and choice. For these thinkers, individual choices are both fundamental and powerful, as they shape who an individual is and who that individual becomes. My including a deity as a reason, an excuse, or a threat to influence my choices is to negate my responsibility. Although I cannot choose but choose, I embrace this freedom. The fact that this freedom is not accorded to me by the God of the Puritans does not make it less authentic. Rather, it becomes more precious. Nothing precious is earned by suffering pretention or by enduring nonsense. Even if freedom is frightening, it is preferable to surrendering to the self-righteous, the unimaginative, and the stupid.
Everything humanity has achieved follows from this freedom.
The greatest distinction between faith and science is that faith requires no evidence. In fact, faith willfully, consciously, and emphatically refuses to examine evidence. Science, on the other hand, is defined by its willingness to observe the world and to make authentic discoveries based exclusively on evidence. A priest might dissect an animal, examine its entrails, and predict the future. A scientist might dissect an animal, examine its entrails, and learn how those entrails work. The first method is divination. The second method is anatomy.
My question for Christians is “Which specialist, the priest or the scientist, would you prefer to cut you open with a scalpel and dig around in your entrails?” Amazing how even the brain-dead of my little town reach for the best scientific advice available to treat themselves; yet they violently oppose our nation’s offering it to others less fortunate than they.
I have been lucky to live in a post-Renaissance, post-Enlightenment era in which freethinkers may be shunned or vilified by the Lambs of God, but they will not be executed as social, political, or spiritual dangers to the community. Thanks to secular safeguards in our nation’s laws and thanks to dauntless individuals throughout our nation’s history--such as Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island on principles that caused the Puritans to banish him--freethinkers can enjoy lives of integrity without their fearing snooping neighbors who will dutifully, if not gleefully, report unorthodox opinions to unforgiving authorities.
Although our nation purports to be modern and civilized, many of our citizens enter the national conversation with dangerously flawed beliefs. A whopping 58% of Republicans believe that God created human beings in our present form. Only 38% of Republicans believe that climate change is real. That number plummets to 29% for the Tea Party. Forty-three percent of the Grand Old Party believe Barack Obama is a Muslim, and only 29% of those bigoted partisans believe that our President was born in the United States.
Damn hard to have a meaningful national conversation when one political party denies reality.
Democracy permits, and even encourages, conflicting ideas, but I doubt that the Founding Fathers envisioned a government in which the group of thugs running the United States Congress has gone--and I am quoting Senator Lindsey Graham--bat-shit crazy.
No question that Republican members of Congress, proudly mugging America with their dogmatic blackjacks, more than meet Senator Graham’s pithy assessment.
Representative Paul Broun (R-GA) said, “All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell.”
Representative Ralph Hall (R-TX) said of climate change, “I don’t think we can control what God controls.”
Representative James Sensebrenner (R-WI) said that climate change data is “massive international scientific fraud” and “scientific fascism.”
Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) became a GOP rock star when he suggested that “dinosaur flatulence” might explain historic warming patterns.
One day, when I was an undergraduate in the 1970s, an Evangelical professor, who--rather ironically--had been appointed as my advisor, put his arm around my shoulders in a paternalistic gesture and reassured me, “Anything is possible with an omnipotent God.”
Today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, I could not agree more. One of these seemingly infinite possibilities is a dangerously anti-intellectual Republican Party, whose standard-bearer is doing his best to poison our nation’s election process and to devastate America’s political, economic and intellectual standing in the world.
God, indeed, works in mysterious ways.
I am amused by those who speak of their growing faith when they should lament their increasing descent into madness. I am annoyed by those who have the arrogance to spread their disease when they should leave their neighbors, friends, and family alone, not bully them with proselytizing. I am horrified when the faithful seize control from the tolerant and the wise.
Rather than their praying silently in private places, the faithful have--in direct proportion to the inflexible madness of their creed--sacrificed the lives of innocents, many of whom had no understanding of their alleged crimes, and the lives of intellectuals, many of whom committed the gravest crime of all, having a free mind and an independent conscience.
As Voltaire observed, “As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities.”
One of the greatest distinctions between faith and science is that authentic scientists--not witch doctor spokespersons for repressive elite regimes--may become cantankerous, even down-right contentious, when they disagree, but they do not burn their opponents at the stake.
What is thwarting modern-day inquisitors who walk among us, keeping an accurate count of whom they would sentence to the block or to the stake if only the political winds were blowing in the Right direction? Is it their reason? Is it their generosity of spirit? Is it their respect for diversity? Is it their love of freedom? Perhaps we should burn some metaphorical incense at the altars of our nation’s guarantors of democracy.
In the late summer of 2016, we must acknowledge that our democracy is faced with the possibility of catastrophe, a seizure of power by the “black souls” among us. Despite this daunting challenge, we must look to the intellectual, social, and political strength of our democratic ancestors and use their hard-won victories as a passport to the future. We must encourage curiosity, stimulate intellectual growth, and maintain a steadfast allegiance to truth. We must challenge extremists at every turn, countering their mythology with knowledge. We must explore avenues of change that heretofore were not open and guide our steps forward with data, not with dogma.
Thomas Jefferson says, “The earth belongs always to the living generation.” Whether it is a religious compact or a political contract, no perpetual law exists. The people themselves have a duty to grow democracy as an organic, dynamic force for change.
This ideal has shaped America’s psyche, reverberating throughout our nation’s history during eras of crisis and eras of triumph. It has consoled us. It has inspired us. It has challenged us.
One of my favorite expressions of this fundamental democratic principle is James W. Loewen’s definition of our job as Americans: Surely, it is to bring into being the America of the future.
Only when we do our job will we address essential human needs. Only when we do our job will we realize the dream of a nation that stands tall and resolute in the service of all its citizens. Only when we do our job will we understand, defend, and strengthen democracy
Only then will we, following our “drummer” down an old path made new, discover the America that once beckoned to me and that still exists in the “better angels of our nature,” waiting for today’s young to make it a reality.