America is a beautiful landscape,
“from sea to shining sea.”
America is also a beautiful idea,
“with liberty and justice for all.”
An old question:
Can we live together,
yet behave as if each one of us was living alone?
Put another way;
can we live well in a free and unrestrained society?
Put another way;
Can I do what I want when I want to without regard to anyone else?
If this is the land of the free, am I not free to do whatever I want?
The answer, of course, is ‘no.’
There is a common good.
There is a personal good.
Each good dependent on the other.
If we are in this together,
then all need to act for the good of the whole and
the whole needs to support the welfare of the individual..
We might ask:
Why do I need the group?
Why does the group need me?
What kind of a ‘me’ does the group need me to be?
The founding English males and the females
who sustained them and benefitted from them
looked to ancient Greece for a model government.
They liked what they saw in Athens.
The Athenians called their form of governing ‘democracy’
Greek for ‘people power.’
There were other options for organizing government:
Theocracy – rule of God who delegates power to a human deputy – king
Autocracy – rule of one all-powerful person – dictatorship
Aristocracy – rule of the upper class
Oligarchy – rule of a very few elite
Anarchy – no organized government keeping order
Our European forebears thought democracy was best.
Democracies have to be clear about who is included in the ‘demos’,
the people.
Just men?
Just landowners?
Just the wealthy?
Just one race?
Just one religion?
Just native-born citizens?
Who is the ‘we’ in “we the people?”
Reluctantly over time, Americans opened up our experiment
in democracy to include more citizens in the ‘we’.
Each time injustice of exclusion was brought to our national attention,
enough people stood up to correct the wrong and make it right.
But not without a fight.
America is beautiful and Americans can be too.
— What makes America beautiful is the diversity of landscapes.
— What makes Americans beautiful is the diversity of people who live peacefully in this landscape..
We continually make a way to fulfill the dream of our experiment in democracy
as we work to “create a more perfect union.” Not perfect, but more perfect.
Perfection – – –
a process of toward an always improvable future,
not a return to a romanticized ‘perfect’ past.
Living Question:
Can we be the beautiful diversity of people
worthy to live in this beautifully diverse landscape?
We the living are the living ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.