Speech delivered 4 July, 2011

How does it feel - to live in a place and time that is the envy of every civilization that has gone before? But wait! We have problems, we say. Wait! There is inequity, red tape, apathy, division, loss. Wait! We are a Nation at War - and we don’t always agree with each other. Yes, all this is true. However, I say in response, wait ~ and

Listen, you might hear the footsteps of those who would defy a government-ordered curfew to step outside their own front door in broad daylight and risk being shot.

Taste, the sweetness of quiet rebellion as dozens of women press the accelerator in a moving vehicle that represents human freedom much more than it does mobility.

Feel, the electricity of hundreds of thousands of people who mobilize to the streets - because they love their country and because they responded to a message on Facebook!

The sensations just described are only cursory vignettes of the powerful democracy movement sweeping the Middle East right now. The so-called “Arab Spring” that began in Tunisia earlier this year is an enormously significant, grass-roots demonstration of exactly what Jefferson articulated in the American Declaration of Independence when he penned:

“...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.”

From Cairo to Syria to Yemen and Libya, we are witnessing a great mobilization led by urban professionals and students who hope to replace authoritarian rule with a more democratic system. Last week, thousands of ordinary people gathered together in the former Soviet bloc country of Belarus and did something extraordinary. Threatened with brutal reprisal should they speak at all in public, and surrounded by a menacing security force, they found a way to convey their cry for human liberty without uttering a single word. They gathered en masse and marched through the streets - clapping their hands.

Today, in our world, in real-time, the common man is finally finding his voice. “Wait!” he cries, and what he means is, “Whatever they’re doing in America, we want that, too.” It is this voice we ought to thoughtfully consider, because it is OUR VOICE.

The world looked to the up-start American Colonies in 1776 initially as a bizarre and doomed curiosity. The whole idea of the American Enlightenment - which began as a liberal revolution - was literally just that - an IDEA. Oh, but what a completely ridiculous and astonishing idea it was! The Founding Fathers referred to their impossibly brilliant task as “The Great Experiment”. Why did they do that?

The simple answer is because it was. The concept was entirely new. America is the first nation in the history of the world whose inception was based on an IDEAL instead of blood-lines or tribal affiliation. It wasn’t easy. The patriots knew they were committing treason against THE supreme power on the face of the planet. They also knew they were dedicating their all to a totally un-tested theory. No one had ever heard of a country tied together in loyalty to a principle. They felt the dreadful weight of that painfully small window of opportunity to orchestrate the greatest coup of all time. Not only was the world watching, but this unbelievably gifted gathering of men (seemingly at random drawn together), pondered a great deal about future generations of Americans yet unborn who might look to them with gratitude or regret. Indeed, the Founding Fathers felt they would one day answer to God, and to the family of man for what they were about to do.

But Wait! - We Forget.

We forget distracted by our modern comforts of satellites and central air and "Dancing With The Stars" episodes, how totally alien it was in World History up to that point for anything to get done anywhere without a King, dictator or some other autocratic power calling all the shots and the accompanying ruling class supported by the labor of the masses.

In our current familiarity with Constitutional rights, we forget that our daily walk out in the open - buying, selling, traveling across state lines and saying just about anything we want to in total confidence - is in debt to what they did for us as they argued and negotiated and agonized about some really crazy, really radical new ideas for how people might organize themselves.

We forget, too, that our freedom to worship “according to the dictates of our own conscience” was also a principle vigorously defended in that hot, humid room in Philadelphia while the Second Continental Congress butted heads together week after week. Everything the Founders did, was with an eye to the future, and a prayer to Heaven, because the odds were miserably against them.

The first shots of the American revolution at Lexington and Concord truly were heard around the world. The “Great Experiment” achieved the unthinkable. We won. We won! Thirteen fractious, tiny, undisciplined little rag-tag colonies fiercely defended their right to the “Pursuit of Happiness”, and negotiated two of the most influential documents in History. The ideals of the Declaration of Independence are about as perfect as they can be. The ideals set forth in the United States Constitution are absolutely breath-taking for their scope and flexibility. The Constitution is the world’s longest-lasting, most imitated written political document. When it was all finally said and done, John Adams marveled that they had by the Grace of God somehow been able to “...form and establish the wisest and happiest government that human wisdom can conceive.” Time would tell how the national and world culture would gradually begin to honor those ideals so conceived.

223 years later The Constitution thankfully is still with us. Democracy is thriving in more countries than ever before. The standard of living has never been higher now that Globalization has brought the world family together with a casual click of a button - and still people leave somewhere else to come here. Amid many complaints and complicated growing-pains we hear at present, we may say - “Wait!”

We must not forget the brilliant foresight of our Constitutional framers who intentionally designed a document to survive a totally unknown future! We should acknowledge that they were undoubtedly moved upon by a Higher Power.

We must not forget that The Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance. We must never forget

that We Are Americans because we Choose to Be. We cannot afford to forget that our precious liberties are still a standard to the world. What they did here, and what we do here, shouts loud and clear to those who likewise long for human freedoms amplified in this, “The Great Experiment”. Neither can we forget this sobering responsibility: the American Flag is the most iconic symbol the world has ever known. It is instantly recognized anywhere. It may not always be welcome, but it’s red, white and blue is definitely understood to symbolize a FREE PEOPLE. THAT is a voice that will not be denied.

Listen, the voice of Freedom is a whisper, growing louder.

Taste, the beauty of this, the “American Dream” that we are all blessed to enjoy and evolve within.

Feel, the momentum of this amazing, tumultuous and Divinely-inspired time in which we are witnessing a surge of the common man, grasping at Liberty and a way of life which he first observed - in us.

This week’s TIME magazine features a picture of the Constitution getting acquainted with a shredder, with the cold caption, “Does it Still Matter?” One of the concluding sentences of this thoughtful essay is genius:

“The Constitution does not protect our spirit of liberty; our spirit of liberty protects the Constitution.”

May it always be so. God bless our families and our sacred honor, and God bless America!

References:

World Current Events, Spring-Summer 2011

The Spirit of America by William J. Bennett

This Nation Shall Endure by Ezra Taft Benson

Time Magazine, "One Document, Under Siege" by Richard Stengel 4 July 2011

Arrogant

The week before Independence Day different media forums hosted a series of explorations into Patriotism. Specifically if Black Americans (I have avoided the over-used and irrelevant African-American title) have had enough time to heal so they can feel patriotic. One young, Black and presumably ivy-league educated panelist - in words dripping with condescension and after a too-long hesitation - answered a question put directly to her this way, "Do I consider myself 'patriotic'? This begs we define the definition of what patriotic means. If it means I can criticize and raise my voice against the flaws I see because my criticism might make things better, then yes, I am patriotic." I turned the radio off when a Black woman in her 60's called in and said she hasn't been able to hang an American flag from her porch until now, because a Black man is running for president.

I read editorials and blogs on the subject until I felt sick. "White guilt" seemed the desired outcome of each poorly directed discussion. A country founded on slavery obviously is not worthy of respect from her citizens. Throughout the guilt-generated attempts to appreciate Black American resentment of America, it was more than curious to hear nothing about the resentment potential in the Native-American populace. Slaves at least have a property value assigned to them; Indians on the other hand had a price for their head.

Who are these educated people who speak as if they have never opened a book? How very convenient to criticize the past applying current cultural norms! In anthropology, this kind of myopic outlook is termed "ethnocentrism": judging other cultures by the standards of your own, which you believe to be superior. This philosophy fueled and legitimized the aggressive colonization era.

Who are these people who are so unhappy in America 2008? They seem unaware of how ignorant they sound as they disregard world history. All countries and systems of government evolve. In Japan, people no longer have their heads whacked off if they look at the Emperor. It took India literally many thousands of years (some experts theorize caste systems were introduced as early as the Holocene) to outlaw their ruthless caste system. It is still not eradicated, but since introduction of the law in 1950 its influence is diminished to the point that the 1997 President of India belonged to a caste formerly considered "untouchable". New Guinea tribesmen have given up head-hunting, the Chinese don't cripple their daughters with foot-binding, fiefdoms are gone from Europe and in central Mexico, they no longer glut themselves in human sacrifice.

Basic human nature has a profound voice in this discussion; we like to have control over others. Every human society ~ given enough time and resources, will eventually break-down into divisions of power. Someone will assert authority over another. It won't be fair, it won't be right, but this is nonetheless the heritage we bear as a human family. The King feels justified in his dictatorship. The Chief lusts for more prestige than he has already acquired by birth or by force. Secret Societies lurk to defraud and disrupt for personal gain. And those who are privileged love to complain.

In my Native American Religions class at Phoenix College a few years ago, the Navajo instructor clumsily manipulated hate rhetoric every class session. There was exceedingly little about the great, spiritual identity of indigenous peoples, but bucket-loads of inflammatory, irresponsible "discussion" about the evils of America and White, Western European culture. I had never been in an environment of hate promotion before. At one point, I had the floor. I made the point that we weren't focusing on the real issue. We can't excuse the real tragedy of broken treaties and cultural assault; but we must not assume an easy arrogance about what was going on within the context of the times. What country in the world was safe-guarding human rights and cultural tolerance in 1860? While the correct ideal was outlined in our founding documents, we as a 19th century world were not prepared to mentally or emotionally embrace it. Changes, however, were definitely in the works. Society was indeed evolving.

Indigenous peoples everywhere are traditionally the first society subjugated by influx of a new, more powerful group. I looked at the Filipino boy in class, the Latinos, the super angry Black man my age who should know better - it was really about human nature. I asked them how far back did we need to go to feel "guilty"? The Filipino boy was hot about the indignities his parents suffered to acquire American citizenship, but it wasn't something that happened in his life-time of driving his own car, texting on his camera phone and attending higher education. He didn't know a thing about the crushing occupation of the Philippines by Japan during WWII. He knew nothing of his own family history beyond their immigration story. Virtually everyone can trace their roots back in time to a period when their people imposed upon another.

Pulitzer prize-winner Roger Wilkins wrote Jefferson's Pillow: the founding fathers and the dilemma of Black patriotism in 2001. As a civil rights advocate, former Assistant Attorney General to Lyndon B. Johnson and a Black man in America, Mr. Wilkins is fully invested in his definition of 'patriotism'. He proposes an interesting study of this country founded on slavery; that without it we could not have succeeded in achieving independence from the Crown. The luxury of slavery afforded their master's sons an elite education in a time when most people were barely literate in the known world. Wilkins offers that these exceptional minds, randomly gathered together at this exceptional blink in history, could not have forged the revolutionary social ideal of the American Constitution without the support, or the pillow of slavery.

Jefferson, like many of his Southern generation, inherited his slaves. Had he freed them, there was nowhere for them to go. They could not own land. There were no rights or privileges in place to protect them at that time. Because Jefferson was a land owner in the South (a qualification that required slavery to sustain), he had the education, means and status afforded him not only to the ruling class, but to devote himself wholly to the exercise of country-building. In creating the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (both documents which literally ignited a human fire for freedom around the world), fighting for the establishment of freedom of religion, public universities and all the other brilliant, before-their-time endeavors he and his Continental Congress colleagues managed to achieve ~ can we still remain so ungrateful? Their singular, hard-fought success is a miracle! There is no logical reason that they should have succeeded. Yet they did.

Because they did, we have the most ideal standard for ordering a society and encouraging individual and collective progress on the face of the planet. There is no other society at any time that began with these ideals and has successfully struggled to protect them as America has thus far. True, the system is flawed. There are corruptions and shameful inequities. But the ideal is perfect. A government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It is when we must add the imperfect variable of human nature to the amalgamation of inspired writ that the ideal becomes unattainable. This is not to say it is still not worth striving for and believing in. And above all, respecting.

I can be the most loathsome, animal sex offender and even kill a child in my depravity. All the physical evidence and eye-witness testimony possible condemns my criminal act - yet I am entitled to have an attorney argue in my defense, and a trial by jury of my peers hear the evidence in a courtroom sworn to impartiality under the law. America set the standard for seeking this level of fairness in a world which is by its very nature besieged by all things unfair.

Tell me again how you need to redefine 'patriotism'. Show me your suffering in America as you buy, sell, marry, work, play and pursue happiness in whatever manner you see fit. Don't point the finger at the past and make it your personal injury today; grow up. The world was a different place yesterday. It was - however unfairly to your modern, Western perspective, right in step with the social culture of the times in which it functioned. You can waste a lot of energy beating your chest about historical injustice. Read a book. You are not re-inventing the wheel by crying, "foul!" now.

You bore me with your indignation that the Founding Fathers owned slaves. You need to read the forcefully written clause Jefferson penned that he hoped would identify slavery for the gross evil it was and destroy it. You need to refresh yourself on the facts of what happened because he wrote that, and how Adams and Franklin begged him to accept compromise on this point, lest they lose the entire Southern delegation and their larger cause be lost. You ought to feel the pathos of that argument, so you can appreciate finally how good men, exceptional men - chose to overlook personal convictions on some points to achieve the potential to establish a more perfect union in the future.

You surprise me with how quickly you are willing to expose your lack of basic world history. After 9/11 and Oprah's furrowed brow looking into the camera asking, "Why do other countries hate us so much?", it irritated me how shocked people were that women were being debased in the Middle East. Some of the most unaware were women at my church, in Relief Society. I very much wanted them to have responded differently. It's not like it was a big secret. To me, it perpetuated the awful truth of Oprah's mental vacancy: they hate America because we are arrogant. We don't know other cultures exist, and we don't care all that much that we don't know.

As we appreciate history on face value, strange ironies emerge with a predictable breath of life. The American Indian Boarding School project was a hundred-plus year experiment in forcibly indoctrinating Native Americans into White culture. After the final Indian Wars, this was the alternative to extermination congress chose...both decisions were actually on the table. The motto: "Kill the Indian, Save the Man" is offensive to us today. But to 19th century Americans, many of whom did not accept Indians as human beings, the idea that these newly surrendered enemies of the state could be rehabilitated was considered logical and humane. Children were taken from their homes and shipped to far away compounds to live, learn and work in white culture. Crammed into triple bunk beds in military style barracks, they died by the scores from typhoid and tuberculosis. But - this was before the cause of contagion was known. Children were publicly humiliated for soiling bedsheets when they had never seen a bed before, or punished for speaking their native tongue. Out of the darkest places of this aggressive, intolerant policy, emerged shining stars: Olympic champions who represented the new, "heroic" American Indian to the world. Boarding school students who graduated and turned around to teach their own in new, more culturally revised curriculum so the students could understand illustrated by Indian student artists. Indians who went beyond trade avocations to actually attend universities. And finally, precisely because of the Boarding School experience, there were thousands of Indians fluent enough in English to accept the challenge as Code Talkers in WWII. Their contribution was no small facet in the turn of the war; in fact, it was crucial. Somehow we feel threatened to concede that good can come from bad circumstances. 

Some of us are too fixated on the past to be truly effective in the present. The sucker-punch of criticism does not define your interpretation of patriotism as much as it defines you as a person, surrounded as you are in the spoils of democracy. My love of country is no less legitimate because of the mistakes of her growing pains. I love America because she is rising ever closer to that original ideal the Founding Brothers envisioned. Her red, white and blue really does speak to millions around the globe of priceless, precious freedom. They feel this without the slightest clue to my interpretation of patriotism. They feel it because it is.

Before Obama was Frederick Douglas. Born a slave in 1817, his Master's wife taught him how to read and write. By doing so, she broke the law and risked her husband's wrath. He was the first Black American to be nominated for President of the United States in a major party's roll call vote at the 1888 Republican National Convention. Frederick Douglas was a great man, and a Patriot. Who are you?

* American flag photo by Asia Tanner Photography