CELEBRATING WHAT EXACTLY?

The question of the day

Katsumi Murouchi

Visiting Paris for a few days, I’m reminded of the intense beauty of this city. Anyone who travels here has to be.

Driving around the Luxor Obelisk at the bottom of the Champs-Elysee, I started thinking about where all that beauty came from. It doesn’t take away from its magnificence to realize how much money had to be hoarded by a small group of people in order to create it. Century after century, a vast majority of the French population lived like serfs in order to support the unbelievable extravagance of a few. And while we gaze with awe at the gorgeous art, sculpture, and architecture in such places as the palaces of Fountainebleau and Versailles, you can also understand the anger of the French people that built up generation after generation, century after century, among those who witnessed all that while having no way to feed their hungry children. Millions of people with no hope of anything ever being better. People whose frustration and despair would lead in time to the grotesque horrors of the French Revolution and the overthrow of the French monarchy and aristocracy. All that beauty led to all that ugliness.

There’s a whole lot to ponder there.

It’s when you realize the human dimension of history that your own point in time opens up to you. Monarchic and aristocratic systems throughout Europe led some of its citizens to simply accept what was, many like the French to revolutionize their societies from within, and some like the American colonists to seek a new life elsewhere. The North American colonies were not settled by people who wanted to separate from England, but they moved to a new continent in hopes of achieving things they felt they could not achieve in Britain. When even in America they felt the frustration and anger of living at the effect of an oppressive King, they declared their independence, fought a revolutionary war, and created their own way of doing things.

So began the United States of America, as an audacious experiment in repudiating the reign of kings. What a sad and bitter irony that our 250th birthday celebration is overseen by someone who clearly doesn’t get the point. Our president has no sense of the radicalism of the American ideal. He doesn’t seem to understand that our country was founded to reject the dictates of an oppressive king; quite the opposite, he wants to be one. Just like Napoleon had the letter N written everywhere, Trump wants his name to be everywhere. Absolute monarchs and imperialistic emperors appeal to him, actually, both those of the past as well as the present. But the United States does not have a king. The role of our president comes with restraints, and President Trump doesn’t like restraints. He wants it to be all him, all the time, doing whatever it is he wants to do. He sees any limits to his power as a personal affront. And while he has cunningly purged the government of almost anyone who would hold him accountable, every day it’s more and more obvious that the American people plan to do so. He knows this, which is why his rigging of the midterms has begun in earnest. We are already in the throes of a cold civil war.

The American people are the heirs of our original ideals, and we are not the first generation needing to defend them. We’re called on now, as others have been before us, to stand for our liberty despite intense opposition. Our Founders understood the horrors of a system in which the whims of one person, enabled by an aristocracy of sycophants, suppressed the hopes and dreams of ordinary people. Nowhere in the Constitution is it written, “Don’t worry, it will all be fine.” Quite to the contrary. It’s a document written by people living hundreds of years before us, trying the best they could to protect us from the worst aspects of ourselves.

What an audacious bunch they were. It’s not enough to celebrate those men; we need to embody their audacity. This 250th birthday celebration should be a time of recommitment and rededication. The sign-off to the Declaration of Independence was this: And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. We need to do that too.

Those 56 men, by signing the Declaration of Independence, were committing treason against the King of England. Had the British won the war, each of them would have been hanged as traitors. It’s one of the great ironies of history that 41 of the signers owned slaves - the most egregious transgression against the very principle of human equality - they nevertheless risked their lives placing into the ethers of human possibility that one day such evils would not exist. It’s been left to every generation that followed to make real in its own time the actualization of the document’s vision. Before we rush to cynically judge those who came before us - which is, after all, so chic to do these days - perhaps we should ask how well we ourselves are doing

America has never completed the task of “creating a more perfect union” - but at our best we have tried. Against great odds we have moved forward, we have self-corrected. Today, however, we’re not just not moving forward. We are not just standing still. We are walking backwards. We have regressed.

July 4th, the official signing of the Declaration, is considered our country’s birthday. The Constitution was ratified twelve years later. With the Declaration of Independence, we separated from England. With the Constitution, we established how we would be doing things our own way.

While Donald Trump’s name is not written in the Constitution, the document was created to ensure that no one such as he would gain power in this country. It happened nevertheless, of course, but not only because of the aggressive nature of the political darkness he represents. It happened just as much because of the political light we failed to commit to. We failed to keep it in our hearts and to teach it to our children. “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” It’s not that we don’t have a vision; there has never been a more visionary statement than our Declaration of Independence. But our vision has been sidelined, and we the people allowed that.

Generation after generation, compromise heaped upon compromise, particularly over the last fifty years, we farmed out our best thinking to those unworthy of the trust. With every passing year our political institutions have become just another form of aristocracy-lite. When Thomas Jefferson said “The only safe repository for power is in the hands of the people,” he meant it. But somehow we forgot.

Let’s go over the four basic principles of the Declaration of Independence, just in case anyone needs to be reminded. 1) All men are created equal; 2) All men are endowed by their Creator with the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, 3) Governments are instituted to secure those rights, and 4) If the government is not doing that job, it’s the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.

Although Donald Trump neither understands nor respects those American First Principles (it was so clear in his interview with Terry Moran that he had never read the Declaration - he said it was about “unity and love and respect”) what ultimately matters is that we do. We can, despite the difficulties of this moment, protect our freedoms and the ideals they signify. That our country is in a state of decline is irrefutable; the question that remains is whether or not that decline is reversible. I choose to believe that it is, but then again I believe in miracles. Americans are in the process of a great remembering. We ourselves created the conditions of our brokenness, and we ourselves are the source of our repair. As we become more humble, as we become more receptive, as we become more available to the great work that lies before us, the seas are gonna rise and the winds will start to blow. The waters are gonna part I tell you. I feel it in my bones.