CHAPTER 2
DREAMS AND PRINCIPLES
Most all Americans were raised to believe and continue to be inspired by the thought that America is a place where dreams come true. People came to this country and continue to come—from villages and cities, farmlands and mountains, every continent and religious orientation—in search of a better life. They have traveled, often against unimaginable odds, packed like sardines in ships and boxcars, with an almost superhuman perseverance. They have desperately climbed walls while soldiers shot at their backs. They have rushed, clutching babies, to cross superhighways without getting run over, knowing that even if they made it across, border guards awaited them on the other side. Whether they came two hundred years ago or two months ago, escaping religious persecution or crushing poverty, their hearts were hearkening to the same song of hope: “Get to the United States. In the United States, things might be better.
Unless your ancestors were slaves brought here from Africa, someone in your family came to this country in hopes of finding an easier life. Someone’s prayer—regardless of whom your ancestors were—was that you might someday have a better life than his or hers. That you might live the American Dream.
A most pertinent question at this time in our history is, “What is the American Dream?” How we answer that question goes far toward defining our relationship to citizenship and to democracy itself. Sometimes we cynically dismiss the idea of an American Dream, spitting at the suffering of millions to whom the concept meant everything, absolutely everything. Surely it behooves us to ask, “What is this thing for which so many have lived and died? What is this gift that I have been given, yet which I often treat as though it is no gift at all?”
We are used to politicians exploiting the concept of the American Dream, using the phrase casually as though all of us understand what it means. But in fact it can mean several things, and in the last few decades, we have clearly emphasized its material rather than its philosophical implications. Is the American Dream a social and political concept—that everyone here can be free? Or is it an economic concept—that anyone here can get rich?
Today, the American Dream is defined by most public leaders in primarily economic terms. Economic progress is deemed synonymous with social progress—if the economy is booming, then America must be doing great! But such an assumption bears a closer look. There are, in fact, powerful countries in the world today—China, for instance—that have adopted economic freedoms while suppressing social and political ones. Money—either the fun of having it or the stress of achieving it—can easily distract us from essential truths regarding the nature of freedom itself.
If our bottom line is money, then we are committed to materialistic values. But if our bottom line is the dream of freedom, then the most important things are not material, and many things are more important than money. Money, like tears, can easily blur our vision. It can seem that because we have money, the dream is alive and well by definition. Or because we don’t have money, we don’t have a lot of time to think about it one way or the other. Or while it’s true we don’t have much money ourselves, we keep hearing constantly how good the economy is doing, so the dream must be flourishing for someone!
In fact, there is much more to freedom than economics. If our dream is merely to make money, then we’re dreaming small—we’re not asking for too much but for too little. We were born, as Americans, into the philosophical promise that here, in these United States, humanity could make its dreams come true. And the highest state of dreaming, for a person or for a nation, is not only that we will get something, but that we will become someone. From that state of being flows all abundance. Money doesn’t control the flow; consciousness controls the flow.”
What our souls truly long for is a state of being, and contrary to the insidious lies of either consumer or political advertising, that state cannot be bought. Money cannot buy internal freedom. It can in many cases buy the things we think will make us feel free, but like Dorothy when she finally meets the Wizard of Oz, we will always at last be forced to see that things have no power to take us home. Home is what we long for; but home is not a material but rather a spiritual condition. We will not be home until we truly, deeply love one another. When that occurs, money will not be allowed to interfere with our commitment to love. Healthy competition, yes; exploitation and economic injustice, no. And from our spiritually rising up that way, we will counterintuitively learn the true secret of material abundance: that it flows more effectively from love than from fear. Thinking that we need the material world makes us slaves to the material world; knowing that we are not of the material world turns us into its masters.
The fact that the American Dream has historically been driven not by money, but by dedication to the creation and maintenance of liberty, is the spiritual blessing that has drawn to us such extraordinary material fortune. As we have sought to bless humanity, so God has clearly blessed us. Our dollar bill is inscribed with a mystical seal “bearing the symbol of brotherly love. Nothing threatens our social order—including our economics—more than a diminished commitment to the dream proclaimed on that seal.”
We are living at a time when the needs of the marketplace are placed so high above the needs of people, here and around the world, that we are known as much for our hypocrisy as for our genius. And this is what we must correct, as other generations before us have corrected the errors of their times. We are a nation that has sold our soul to the highest bidder. And now our economics must be brought into alignment with our goodness, or we will lose the blessing at the core of our democracy. We will no longer be able to bequeath it to our children, as others, at often such great cost, bequeathed it to us.
AS A NATION, we have a collective psyche, a common river of thoughts and feelings that runs through the soul of every American. That river runs beneath our dreaming like an underground source of nourishment and aid—America’s emotional Nile. The American Dream, when best understood, is the fact that we have the right to dream at all. It is the right to expect that our talents and abilities and diligence, not the prejudices of others, will determine the nature of the lives we live. That is a spiritual principle, and a radical thought, to which the nation was committed at its founding. While reality often contradicts the dream, and various forces would seek to squelch it, the American Dream stays alive within the collective mind.
A national dream, in order to remain viable, must be as a spark reignited in the heart of each generation. Otherwise, our river of hope dries up. A dream doesn’t rest on reason but, rather, flies on the wings of passion, and unfortunately, most modern education systems do not honor passion. We are not taught to love our great historical truths but merely perhaps to memorize them. For far too many of us, the embrace of essential democratic principles has not been the reenactment of a courageous, experiential response to the darkness of ancestral history, but merely a mechanical recitation of words. And yet poignantly, many millions of Americans would still willingly risk their lives for these principles. There is something in us well aware of an unutterably precious nugget of truth in the vision of our forefathers, which in some mysterious way still applies to all of us.
Our right to dream whatever life we wish for ourselves, and our responsibility to respect the dreams of others, is the fulcrum of the American ideal. Even in the most oppressive societies, some people have the right to dream. What makes a democracy different is that we are all supposed to have that right, and a reasonable opportunity to make our dreams come true.
Many people in America have lived lives of very limited, even cruelly squelched dreams not through any fault of their own but, through accidents of history and various forms of obstruction and injustice. That has been true in the past and it is true today. To deny this is not to honor the dream but to mock it. If any Americans are denied the right to weave their dreams, then America itself isn’t weaving hers. It is the job of every generation of Americans to further expand and fulfill the dream of freedom and justice for all.
In former generations, both bondage and freedom had mainly a material face. Slavery, oppression, and injustice were externalized, therefore our dreams of ending them were made external as well. In ending slavery, we committed to the dream. In passing child labor laws, we committed to the dream. In passing civil rights legislation, we committed to the dream. Every generation plays out the struggle between those who would expand the dream and those who would constrict it. Reinterpreting the American Dream to mean very little more than a job that pays well is to rob it of its deeper meaning. Now, in order to expand the dream of freedom for the times in which we live, our main responsibility is to re-examine the meaning of both freedom and bondage.
“Today, our states of bondage are not material so much as emotional and psychological and spiritual, and all states of material bondage still existing would disappear in a moment were we to free our hearts and minds. What we most need to be free of now is our tendency to distract ourselves from the pain of the world, our tendency to isolate rather than join with others, our own selfishness and narcissism and unforgiveness and greed. Those tendencies are not our sins, but our wounds. They are our modern prisons, and the modern version of the American Dream is to break free of these chains within ourselves.
THE AMERICAN DREAM began with those who came here to escape their nightmares. Some, in fact, found their nightmares here. Our Founders were the oddest mix of all: they both articulated the dream for themselves and their children and, in the case of those who owned slaves, perpetrated a nightmare on others. Now we find ourselves, as their descendants, with the job of maintaining and extending our national dreams, and awakening from the horrors of our national nightmares.
Our Founders were not perfect people—a fact to be neither whitewashed nor ignored—but they reached nonetheless for extraordinary ideals and encased them in a Constitution that institutionalizes our liberty. They risked their lives signing the Declaration of Independence, thus making a historic break from the past—a past they deemed an unworthy template for the human experience. They changed the course of human events, reaching beyond the accepted boundaries of what was to be expected from life, stretching the limits of human possibility. They left in their wake a compelling promise, not only to Americans but also to people throughout the world, that a society could exist in which the individual talents and abilities of free, self-governed people could come together fruitfully, harnessed in the service of a collective good.
They also left in their wake, of course, the tragic irony of the evil disconnect between a nation dedicated to the rights of all men, and the institution of slavery, the oppression of women, and the genocide of Native Americans. The juxtaposition of those historical realities lies at the crux of our ongoing narrative.
The founding of America is not a tale drawn from one-dimensional, perfect lives. Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, Adams, and Paine were very real people—nothing in their day like the formal and official portraits of them that now hang in polite museums. The same is true of their successors—the great Ameri“can statesmen, political thinkers, social reformers, philosophers, writers, and artists who have helped us refound ourselves from that day to our own time.
In making wooden characters of very juicy people we have diminished our emotional connection to them. Lincoln would bury his head in his hands each time news reports reached him of massive casualties in the Civil War, sobbing, “I cannot bear it, I cannot bear it.” Polio victim Franklin D. Roosevelt clung to the arm of his son in a heroic effort to appear to walk on his own to the podium at the 1932 Democratic Convention, knowing that if Americans thought he could not walk they would never elect him. He succeeded, and was then described by a friend as having been “cleansed, illumined and transformed by his pain.
What is important is not merely that we record history, or that we understand it, from a seemingly objective perspective. What matters is that we take it personally, that we own it in the deepest part of ourselves, that we might solidify its power where it is something to be proud of and try to transform it where it is not.
The great figures of American history still reach us from the grave, having said and done things that affect each of us in a practical manner, every day of our lives. Their stories illuminate not only what happened before but most significantly what is likely to happen again. We are challenged by an adequate knowledge of history to measure our lives in relation to it, to succeed where others have faltered, to run the race that others ran, to try to keep the wheels of history moving in a positive direction. The past teaches us, most important, that the movement of history in a positive direction can never, ever be taken for granted.
Yet our generation did take it for granted. As inheritors of our Founders’ vision, we just seemed to assume that the vision was being looked after by someone. We acted like heirs to a huge financial fortune who didn’t seem to think that we needed to look after the accounts. We figured showing up to vote every four, maybe every two years would be enough; we didn’t seem to realize we were also going to have to think about what was happening. We figured “political people” were doing that.
But the Founders’ vision is of a country governed by its citizens, and citizens who do not vigorously think about their government will end up governed by someone else. And that is exactly what has happened.
Having lost our revolutionary fervor—bought off, in the end, so easily—we became like the royalists who did not support the revolutionaries, who chose to remain in the yoke of serfdom, trading the sometimes uncomfortable quest for freedom for the comfort of false security. Our Founders asserted the dramatic proposition that if ordinary people are deliberative and responsible, then they can run the affairs of their nation. But decades ago, too many of us stopped doing that. With our voter participation among the lowest of any democracy in the world, we have allowed an unholy alliance of government—like a new monarchy—and corporate influence—like a new aristocracy—to take control of events in a way that would have made our Founders shudder. Surely, were they here now they would worry for the dream of liberty that they weaved for their posterity. We have not lost our rights, but neither are these rights profoundly secure. We are much like a massively bleeding person who has not died yet. That person will die unless transfused. And we will lose the precious blood of our democratic freedoms if we do not wake up and act.
We became a distracted nation, knowing more about the lives of celebrities than of our great historical figures, and more about the way our toys worked than the way our democracy works. Yet now, with the experience of the last few years, millions are waking up to the crisis this has created. There is a hunger rising among us to get back to the things we forgot along the way.
Revisiting the First Principles of our democracy are an essential tool in reclaiming it. The principles that our Founders elucidated in the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights, then continuing with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, are the sacred powers at the core of American democracy. They are not rules but values. They act as pillars upholding the dynamic energy of American democracy, and they can handle “any assault except the people’s diminished commitment to them. It is seriously detrimental to our individual and collective good that the average American citizen can’t quite tell you what those principles are.
Our democratic principles are the essential ingredients in the American Dream. They protect the dream and stave off the nightmares. They are the light at the center of our democratic hopes.
FIRST PRINCIPLES
America’s First Principles are simple and basic. They are undergirded by an even more basic idea: that we are a democracy and thus govern ourselves. These principles are guideposts for the process of doing so. They are the keys to our freedom and the freedom of our children.
We must reclaim our passion for these principles. Citizenship means more than voting, paying taxes, or obeying laws. It is, when we choose it to be, a powerful expression of self, the absence of which makes it easy to steal from us the powers we have been granted.
America’s First Principles are not partisan issues. They are the things on which we have agreed to agree. We agree that all people should be equal before the law. We agree that power in America shall stem not from the government to the people but rather from the people to the government. We agree to seek to balance individual rights with protection of the general welfare. And we agree that people shall have the right to freely practice and share their religious, social, and political beliefs without threat of external tyranny.
A nation “so conceived,” in the words of Lincoln, is divinely inspired by the universal blessing inherent in these First Principles. Divine inspiration is not a metaphor. From a spiritual perspective, it is a literal power to transcend and subsume all lesser ideas.
There are dramatic examples throughout our history of contests between those who would commit the nation to its stated principles and those who would compromise those principles for short-term personal or economic gain. The Civil War, for instance, pitted those who chose to hold the nation to its principle of equality for all against those who tried to secede from the Union rather than give up slavery and comply.
In other words, our governmental principles are often more advanced than we are, owing to the extraordinary prescience and genius of our Founders. In 1801, the newly elected President Jefferson admonished the nation to make “periodic recourse to first principles,” relying on their power and the power of our collective agreement to adhere to them, to guide us as beacons through darkened times.
It is extremely rare that an issue comes up in American society that does not have light cast upon it by our First Principles. They form America’s political bedrock. Today, our problem is that most Americans do not know what those principles are. We were either taught them at school (where, in many cases, they’re not even taught anymore!) and have forgotten them, or we actually never learned. We therefore tend to think of political negotiation as a fight between competing opinions, rather than a process by which we all work toward a higher realization of principles on which we already agree.
Our First Principles stand outside of time, providing a stillness that keeps our nation centered through the centrifugal tides of historical change. Referring back to them collectively is an exercise of democratic authority. We have allowed the stresses and merchandising of modern life to lure our attention toward lesser things, creating a crisis in American democracy.
The First Principles are our tools; every citizen needs to have them in his or her mental pocket. You don’t have to be a lawyer to understand them; James Madison was the leading spirit among those who wrote the Constitution, and he was not a lawyer. You don’t have to be a college graduate; George Washington was not a college graduate. You don’t have to be a so-called expert to have a valid opinion. You don’t have to be anything but a citizen to be the source of power in the United States. In fact, that’s the entire point of our power: that it belongs to “We, the People.”
These principles are planted firmly in the soil of human conscience, and they are important for their spiritual as well as political significance. They hold power not only for us but also for people throughout the world, because they reflect the tenets of a higher law. Hearts around the world have hearkened to these principles, from French Revolutionaries in the eighteenth century to Chinese dissidents in Tiananmen Square.
And yet, for this country, only one thing matters: do our hearts hearken to them now?
I once said to my then six-year-old daughter, an avid Barbie fan, “Darling, Barbie looks anorexic. Someone with a body like that would be in the hospital with a very bad disease. Her hair is stupid and her values are questionable. Do you think she ever does any charity work?” My daughter looked me squarely in the eye and said, “Mommy, I love who I love. I’m not going to change my thoughts.” I gulped. I didn’t agree with my child’s opinion, but I was glad she was so quick to defend her right to have one. You’re never too young to learn that you have the right to your opinions, and to your freedom to express them.
You’re also never too old to make sure that no one ever, ever gets away with compromising that freedom, as long as you’re around.
PRINCIPLE 1: EQUALITY OF RIGHTS AND OPPORTUNITY: That all of us are equal before God and should be treated that way by the American government.
The higher point of our equality as Americans is not just that it reflects our Founders’ thoughts but that it also reflects God’s thoughts. To commit to equality is to align with the will of God, that we should love each other as He loves us.
The wording of the Declaration of Independence is as follows: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
This principle is easy to take for granted, until we remember exactly what it means. It means that in this country, it is not the circumstances of our birth, but the fact that we are American, that determines our rights and opportunities to pursue happiness. Note that the Declaration says it is the responsibility of government to secure those rights.
James Madison, the father of our Constitution, wrote, “Who are to be the electors of the federal representatives?” His response defined the ideal meaning of equality in America: “Not the rich more than the poor; not the learned more than the ignorant; not the haughty heirs of distinguished names more than the humble sons of obscure and unpropitious fortune.”
The ideal of equality, and our progress toward its full manifestation, is central to American democracy. Regarding both rights and opportunities, equality as a first principle is seriously threatened in America today—yet the threat is largely underestimated. It is couched in words that imply we take equality for granted here, that of course we all believe in it, and therefore we need not be vigilant on its behalf.
Routinely today, however, this first principle is made to stand second or third in line. Yes, we have made strides—in civil rights, women’s rights, and so on—but no, this is not the time to relax. Those with money today have become, in reality though not in principle, more “equal” than anyone else.
Corporate welfare (tax subsidies to our wealthiest corporations) increases to the tune of billions of dollars, while programs that support the health and well-being of our own children are obliterated or turned over to already overburdened private charities. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr: “If they give it to the rich, they “call it a subsidy; if they give it to the poor, they call it a handout.” The American public is being asked to acquiesce in an unethical arrangement whereby we withdraw support from poor children to make sure that the children of parents more well off are taken care of in an even more privileged fashion. If we believe in the principle of equality, then the rich should not be granted greater opportunity than the poor.
Every time we take support away from nutritional, medical, educational, or job training and creation programs that benefit those who need them most—then give tax breaks or corporate subsidies to the far more privileged—we are attacking the first principle of equality in America. Yet that is the basic trend in American government today.
The most dramatic form of inequality in America now is economic inequality. The gap between rich and poor has been steadily increasing in this country for more than twenty years. In the words of the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “We can have a democratic society or we can have great concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.” Thomas Jefferson said that we must endlessly struggle for, and never be complacent until we have achieved, equal opportunity for modest prosperity and equal treatment before the law of every American citizen. And economic inequality extends its unjust influence: criminal justice, for instance, is statistically biased in the United States. If you’re poor in America today, your chances for justice are far less than if you’re rich.
Where there is little adequate education—as in the inner cities of America—there is no equality of actual opportunity. Where there is little adequate health care—as among America’s poor and even some of our middle class—there is no equality of actual opportunity. Where there are very few opportunities for true professional advancement—as is also true among America’s poor—there is no equality of actual opportunity.
Many issues look different when seen through the lens of the first principle of equality—universal health care, education, and criminal justice, to name a few. The fear-based thinking of the world gives emphasis to our differences, and thus our separation. Such thinking diminishes our commitment to equality; the right of any American is the right of every law-abiding American.
It’s impossible to appreciate that our rights matter, without appreciating that our personhood matters. Every person matters; in that single thought lies the moral authority of American democracy. Our rights to free public education, free speech, a free press, freedom of religion, and free association among ourselves—all of these freedoms exist to create and maintain our equality as citizens.
It is very important that we teach our children what this means, and why it matters. Our rights matter because people matter. No one is supposed to get to tell you what you can do or say in the United States, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. Anyone who understands history, or current world affairs, knows what an awesome blessing this is, and what gratitude we owe those who have given their lives to secure it, that we can assume in this country even minimum compliance to the principle of equality. Throughout the world, there are people living in fear that they might “disappear” if something they say or do offends the official order. Women in Afghanistan today, in areas still under Taliban control, risk torture or death if they even wear the wrong clothes. The principle of equality is a very, very serious issue indeed.
Our equality before the law, theoretically, is not up for discussion. It is the birthright of every American; it is a given. But just because something is encoded in law doesn’t mean we can take for granted its constant enforcement. The only way a legal principle remains safe is if it remains alive in our hearts. We must be ever vigilant that the law, and the principles which uphold it, are not compromised while we’re not looking. To think otherwise is not “being positive,” but childish.
Martin Luther King, Jr., used to say that he was not going to Washington to ask for rights for black Americans, but to demand the rights they had been given already. To threaten anyone’s liberty is to threaten everyone’s liberty. As my father used to say, “What they can do to anyone, they can one day do to you.
The political question, for instance, should not be, “What do you think of LGBTQ people?” but rather, “Do we or do we not remain committed to the principle of equality for all, and how does that principle apply to the quest for LGBTQ rights?” Whether someone in America likes someone else in America is irrelevant to what both of their rights should be before the law. The only way we can be vigilant on behalf of our children’s freedom is if we are vigilant on behalf of everyone’s freedom.
In the words of Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor who was imprisoned by the Nazis for eight years because he spoke out against Hitler, “First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, but I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, but I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.
PRINCIPLE 2: E PLURIBUS UNUM: That within our diversity lies a national unity—that we are at the same time a people who reflect and embody diversity, yet are united in our fealty to these treasured First Principles.
Our Founders were students, directly and indirectly, of a wide-ranging body of ideas and information. Both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were careful and respectful students, for instance, of the government and politics of the Iroquois Confederation and other Native American peoples.
In the Iroquois Indian Confederacy, different Native American tribes retained their individuality yet created a common network for the sake of progress and mutual protection. In that sense, they were progenitors of our republic. They were different, yet in certain ways they were one. Echoes of that governmental philosophy can be found in America’s first principle called E Pluribus Unum, or “Unity in Diversity.”
There are people in America who emphasize our unity yet fail to appreciate our diversity, just as there are those who emphasize our diversity yet fail to appreciate our unity. It is important to honor both. It is our unity and our “diversity that matter, and their relationship to each other reflects a philosophical and political truth that democracy requires.
Unity and diversity are not adversarial, but rather complementary elements in American society. Both make us better. We are woven from many diverse threads, yet we make one piece of fabric; we are many and one at once. You’re Catholic and you’re an American; you’re gay and you’re an American; you’re black and you’re an American. Neither identity is to be sacrificed for the sake of the other.
When the country was founded, our diversity was determined mainly by our geographical dimension. Massachusetts was very different from the Carolinas; they remained true to their individual identities while at the same time forging one American culture. Our statehood now is less a critical geographical concept than an ideological one; our ethnicity, beliefs, and economics define our differing “states” today. We are different colors, different religions, different beliefs, and different cultures. Yet we are united in our fealty to these common principles. It is not our weakness, but in fact our strength, that we are represented in this country by citizens from literally every other nation of the world. Our power lies not in excluding each other but in including each other, not only legally but also emotionally and spiritually. We are all Americans, and we are involved in a great experiment together. No group of Americans are the “normal” Americans, no group of Americans monopolize truth or wisdom or righteousness, and no group of Americans deserve more or less protection or opportunity from the American government.
“It is when we have a healthy experience of our individual identity, that we can then most easily accept sharing a larger one. But that first step cannot be skipped; it’s wrong to expect someone to play down his or her religious or racial identity in service to a larger identity until he or she has first been shown honor for what that individual identity is. I’ll stop going on and on about being a woman once I feel you respect me as one. At that point—once “we have all been acknowledged as individually significant—it’s important that we turn our attention to the betterment and preservation of the nation we all share.”
Unity in diversity is a principle demanding our personal maturity. We must develop the ability to tolerate the creative chaos of many voices and opinions all expressing themselves at once; to not seek control over the thoughts or behaviors of others just because they are different from us; and to listen with respect and recognize the dignity of those with whom we disagree. It is not a First Principle in America that any one group gets to be right. It is a First Principle that each of us, and each of the diverse cultures living together here, has valuable things to say and to contribute. Allowing everyone to do so is central to our liberty, our genius, and our progress toward a greater good.
As children of God, it’s not just our equal rights that should be stressed but our equal brilliance as well. During the spring of 1998, I was invited to speak at a gathering hosted by the Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, in Memphis, Tennessee. The event was called a Unity Banquet, held as part of the celebration of a Season for Nonviolence, in which eight different local ethnic groups shared some unique expression of their own cultures—dance, song, clothing, food, and so on. Young Muslim women did a magnificent performance piece, Mexican women modeled dresses from their native communities, small Chinese children gave a martial arts demonstration, Ukrainians shared ethnic foods, and the like. Before the event, I had no conscious prejudice against any of those groups. But neither had I the deeply profound respect and admiration for their cultures that I gained that day. I had never before been moved to tears by their unique contributions to the human spirit.
“James Madison once said that “tolerance is not enough” because, psychologically, tolerance still implies judgment. In order to experience the highest possibilities of American culture, the social fruition of the ideal of E Pluribus Unum, we will need to do more than merely tolerate each other. America won’t fulfill its most noble dream until we actually come to admire each other for the glorious characteristics of our uniquely individual ethnic identities. It is only when we have come to the point where we genuinely bless each other’s children, and recognize their potential brilliance, that we will be on the path to the possible America.
There are many people in America today who “tolerate” others through clenched teeth, who “respectfully disagree” with a look that is chilling. Their look seems to say, “Until we take over, I accept that we haven’t yet.” America belongs to all of us. Equality means that none of us is inherently more valuable than anyone else. Freedom means that we actually like it that way.
PRINCIPLE 3: BALANCE OF INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY AND PROTECTION OF THE COMMON GOOD: That it is the responsibility of government to protect the general welfare, yet with enough checks and balances
America ideally seeks to balance the needs of the individual with an appreciation of our common good. This principle is central to our greatest achievements, but also to our greatest political battles.
Sometimes we’re appalled because the government is getting into our business and we think it should keep its nose out; other times we’re appalled because we feel the government hasn’t adequately taken care of the collective good. When American politics is at its best, we create a healthy balance between the two.
Yes, it’s true that we should protect the environment and the children, our most precious resources—but yes, it’s also true that an individual should be free to pursue his or her own economic goals with as little interference or obstruction as possible. Yes, it’s true that law enforcement officials should have the necessary power to protect us—but yes, it’s also true that the individual should be protected from too much police or governmental interference. Collective welfare versus individual rights; this is the dynamic tension underlying most political debate today, and it’s amazing how passionate we get when we’re revved up about one or the other.
Don’t you dare try to take away my right to own a gun” versus “Can’t the government get all these guns off the street?” “How dare the government tell me how to regulate my business” versus “Why won’t the government protect us from the chemicals in that pesticide?” What so often shows up as violent competition becomes, when we truly learn to listen to each other, the stuff of creative synergy. Freedom doesn’t mean we will always agree; it means we all have important points of view to contribute to the mix.
President Eisenhower once said that the American mind at its best is both conservative and liberal. We need to conserve those things that are eternally true and still retain the ability to respond liberally and spontaneously to the immediate demands of our time. What’s so lacking in American politics today is people showing adequate respect for those who disagree with them. An intelligent person can understand that both individual and collective rights are important to the nation. Depending on the issue, liberals and conservatives stress different sides of the equation.
A true liberal doesn’t think government can fix all our problems, and a true conservative doesn’t believe that whatever is good for corporate America is always good for Americans. Yet there are many on both sides of our political debate who would stereotype their adversaries as thinking that way. What is lacking, obviously, is a dignified, civilized center. We have too little “golden mean” in politics today. Somebody is always pointing a finger, it seems, saying “He,” “She,” or “They” are the enemies of America, when in truth, our greatest enemy is that pointed finger.
After the hardest-fought presidential election of his time, Thomas Jefferson reminded his countrymen, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” Civic life in America should include vigorous debate between liberals and conservatives as well as everyone else; that is democracy in action. But the debate must remain within the bounds of mutual respect and dignity or our civil life is no longer civil. Those who view political debate as merely “your needs and desires versus my needs and desires”—with no respect for America’s need to balance individual liberty with the common good—bring down the political process.
Individual liberty matters as well as the collective good. I’m as guilty as the next person of giving in to anger when I feel strongly about an issue and someone else either doesn’t share my passion, or works to thwart the goals I feel are important. In the Preamble to the Constitution, it says, “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” To me, “promoting the general welfare” includes the care and protection of America’s children.
I’m passionate about the fact that one-fifth of America’s children live in poverty, that millions of our children go to schools in which there aren’t even working toilets, in slums where the social and economic conditions are as dire as during the worst days of the Great Depression. In many cases, these kids are living with circumstances as desperate as any war zone, daily dodging bullets; meanwhile, Congress gives more and more economic largess to the richest among us while failing to provide food support, universal health care, access to higher education, adequate job-training programs, small-business loans, or other resources to millions who need such things to lift themselves out of poverty. To add to that, the funneling of our material resources ever more consistently in the direction of those who already have them is often couched cynically and insidiously in terms of service to the American people.
But as passionately as I feel about those things, I also know this: as outraged as we might be at the sight of injustice, we must remain equally excited by the possibilities for a better world that lie on the other side of it. In God, all things are possible. The enlightened activist is fueled by the faith that another kind of world is reachable, and that it is the purpose of our lives to bring it forth. That, to me, is the American Dream.
Optimism is an essential part of the American character; out of it we were born, and only with it shall we repair. Our national soul depends upon it. We must not allow cynicism or anger to warp us. As long as I’m working against something I hate instead of for something I love, I’m of the old and not the new. The politics of a healed America is a love for what could be and a reach for the possible.
And none of us has a monopoly on truth. It’s hard at times to develop a nonviolent, loving, and respectful attitude toward our political adversaries, but anything less keeps us stuck on the political wheel of suffering. Saint Thomas Aquinas once wrote, “We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject. For both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in the finding of it.” I’ll write that out and put it on my bathroom mirror, if you’ll write it out and put it on yours.
PRINCIPLE 4: RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: That every American shall worship how he or she wishes, if he or she wishes, according to the individual’s own conscience and with no governmental interference in that right.
The separation of Church and State was not meant to religiously constrict us, but rather to religiously free us. We were all taught as children that early Americans came to this country fleeing religious persecution, committed to the creation of a society in which no one could be told by the government either how to worship or even whether to worship. And neither would their new government be constricted in any way by an official religious dogma. Both government and religion are thereby protected from interference by the other. A thick line between Church and State keeps our religious lives free of any government pressure and our government free of religious pressure. It is an enlightened and enlightening concept.
Our Founders did not seek to block the religious path but rather to free it of all obstruction. They recognized that religious dogma can be as detrimental to the human spirit as political dogma, and can often be used to restrict the rights of others. That was not to be allowed in the United States. Our Founders themselves were men of spiri“tual conviction, though many of them would be hard pressed to meet the standard of what some people call religious today. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against any form of tyranny over the mind of man.” He recognized religious tyranny to be as oppressive as any other.”
But separating the State from the undue influence of religious institutions was in no way meant by our Founders to be an impediment to the search for higher truth, within the individual or within society. They embraced the Creator while refusing to pay homage to specific dogmas claiming to monopolize religious truth. That stance was in support, not rejection, of the true religious experience. The separation of Church and State was intended to support our spiritual flowering by guaranteeing its freedom.
Spirituality, to many of us, is as important to the soul as is oxygen to the body. Without it, the world can make sense to the mind but it can never make sense to the heart. But the spirit is an internal phenomenon, and civilization has always suffered when any particular dogma or doctrine has sought to impose itself upon the peoples of the world. The highest, most spirit-filled religious consciousness is a living water, and that water is poured into the world not through religious doctrine but through the human heart. Love itself is the highest religious experience. No religion has a monopoly on God because religion itself has no monopoly on God. God is looking to us for more than words alone; He is looking for our forgiveness, mercy, and love. Ecclesiastical, orthodox religious systems are not the only arbiters of spiritual force. They are not the only spiritual guides. We will not be renewed by a worldly religious authority, but by the spirit of love at the heart of all the great religious traditions.
Religious freedom, as an American first principle, means no one in America has a right to monopolize the religious discussion. Even today, people throughout the world face torture and murder for not seeing God the way someone else does. It is one of the cornerstones of American liberty that we make a stand for religious freedom. Jefferson wrote, “Toleration is not enough. What we need is liberty, fully protected by the law, to believe or not “believe as you see fit.” America was not founded to protect the definition of God as proposed by any one group or individual; it was founded to protect our liberty to think however we wish to think.”
We must not indulge any group of Americans who seek to ban other people’s conception of spirituality from the public sphere on the basis that “it is not of God,” when in fact it simply isn’t in line with their conception of God. We are not a Christian nation. We are not a Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu nation. We are not a Buddhist, Sufi, Baha’i, or any other officially religious nation. We are not an atheistic nation. We are a religiously pluralistic society in which one’s freedom to worship as he or she wishes, or not to worship at all, is fully protected by law. Thomas Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
Obviously, the principle of religious freedom is as relevant to our politics today as it was over two hundred years ago. Such issues are never truly put to bed; they simply come around again and again until human consciousness has evolved to the point where they are no longer an issue at all. As Americans, we have the blessing of our First Principles to guide us at times such as these, to give us the moral authority, the courage and conviction, to make a stand for our essential freedom at times, like this one, when forces are arrayed against them.
THERE ARE THOSE in America today who seem to distrust the mechanics of liberty. Democracy is indeed a radical proposition. It is posited on the notion that each of us, from the depth of our own wisdom, brings to society the unique and precious gift of our own viewpoint and experience. We do not, and will not, always see things the same way; that is not a bad thing, but a good thing. Nowhere does this hold true more than in the area of religion.
In making a basic study of comparative religion—reading such books, for instance, as Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions—we see the universality of basic religious themes. Throughout the world, from Ireland to Bosnia to the Middle East, and increasingly in the United States, violence comes from fear born of ignorance of another’s religious viewpoint. There is one God, and one God only. He pours Himself into many vessels, expressing His Truth in many ways, but still His Truth is one. And that Truth is love.
Religious pluralism is a most crucial issue in the world today. We should be learning more about our own religious traditions and the traditions of our fellows. In this way we will come to know the unity in our religious diversity, without which we cannot appreciate the full genius of our American system of government or the greater glory of God.
RELIGION CAN BE a confusing concept. The word itself comes from a root that means “to bind back.” The actual religious experience is a “binding back” of our hearts to the truth within. An example of a spiritually based political force in America was the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Although emanating from Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, its call reached not only Christians but all people of goodwill, for its message was one of brotherhood and nonviolence. That’s what made it so radical and also so purely religious. King’s goal of achieving the “beloved community” is a vision at the heart of not one but all religious faiths.
There is an important distinction to be made between a religiously based and a spiritually based political impulse. While religion is a force that either creatively or noncreatively separates us, spirituality is a force that unites us by reminding us of our fundamental oneness. The religionization of American politics is dangerous; the spiritualization of our political consciousness is imperative.
When violence erupted in Israel in September of 1996 over the Israeli opening of a tunnel near the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the clear difference between religious dogma and spiritual passion was obvious. For three of the great religions of the world, this particular piece of land is holy: Muslims believe that Muhammad ascended to heaven from there, the Jews believe that it is the spot from which God created the universe, and the Christians hold that Christ walked past there on his way to the cross. While a strictly exoteric religious perspective tempts us to compete for land, a genuine spiritual experience joins our hearts.
The authentic teachings of all the great religious perspectives reveal that it is not land that matters but love itself. God’s call is not that we build His temple on a particular piece of land, but in our hearts. This is where the Rock is.
Many people in the world today use religion to divide us. They cite a particular book, whether the Bible, the Koran, or any other religious text, and claim that herein lies a universal prescription for all human behavior. Such fundamentalist mentality is more about God than of God, and the distinction between the two is one of the most important issues in world affairs today.
Of the People, By the People, For the People
America’s First Principles are inscribed not only in the Declaration of Independence and in our Constitution but also in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. President Lincoln declared at Gettysburg that “this nation . . . shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” What a radical concept that is—a government of the people, by the people, for the people. It means, of course, that not only will the government consist of our citizens, elected by our citizens, but that its mission shall be to serve our citizens.
We should take a good look at that sentence—especially the part that reads “for the people”—and ask ourselves if we have decided to be the generation to repudiate Lincoln’s words. President Rutherford B. Hayes once lamented that we were becoming a government “of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations.”
If ours were a government for the people, wouldn’t all our children receive the best education in the world? If ours were a government for the people, wouldn’t we have universal health insurance? If ours were a government for the people, wouldn’t we have massively committed to a green economy by now? What has happened to us, that so many have been lured into believing what’s good for huge corporate forces is inherently what’s good for us? And what’s happened to the rest of us, that we at times so weakly resist?
America’s most fundamental problem is a crisis of our democratic process. We are being asked, as we were asked over two hundred years ago, to decide for ourselves and our children what it is worth to us to govern ourselves. While it appears that we have problems very different from those faced by earlier generations, in fact it is not the complexity of our current problems but rather the simple drama behind them all that should be garnering our attention. What we call the issues are not the issue. The issue is the disengagement of the average American’s heart and mind from the democratic process. We have stopped participating in droves, and in our absence, forces not always in favor of the greatest good for the greatest number have exercised their own rights, often leaving the average American at a distinct disadvantage in our own country.
The greatest issue that confronts us now, as it has confronted every generation to some degree, is this: Is America to be ruled by all of us and for all of us—or has the American government in fact become a government of, by, and for a relative few?
A mean group of selfish people did not just decide to steal America; what happened is that we gave her away. We were not vigilant on behalf of our own good. We failed to make periodic recourse to First Principles, allowing ourselves the disempowerment of ignorance and distraction. We turned our eyes away from things that, in a free and democratic society, the citizenry cannot afford to turn our eyes away from. And now we are in a crisis of democracy that could easily have been predicted; in fact, with the first publication of this book, it was.
Yet what we chose to ignore before, we can choose to look at now. Let us look with courage and conviction at the principles that alone not only make us great, but also make us free. Our Founders strove to overthrow the very notion of aristocracy, creating a system in which anyone could rise according to his or her own abilities, talents, and efforts. What they strove for then, we must strive for now. Jefferson thought democracy was humanity’s best antidote for what he referred to as the “general prey of the rich on the poor”—rebellion against which he considered natural and good. And what his generation rebelled against in their time, we must rebel against in ours.
In a society where selfishness and greed have become the accepted ethos, a commitment to social justice is a rebellious mode of being. We now need more, not less, of the Jeffersonian spirit of true rebellion. While a market-obsessed corporate mentality lords over us like a new ruling class, we act more like royalists than like our own Revolutionary forebears. This time we are not being assaulted directly, as the colonists were by the English through endless taxes and other burdens, but rather through an endless dripping stream of pleasure that the system is able to provide us, much like a low-grade morphine pump pushed into our veins, making us think we can’t live without it. Pleasure can be used to enslave a person as effectively as pain.
Let us not be so addicted to the pure adrenaline rush of contemporary culture that we fail to rebel against the erosion of our democracy. Let this moment of awakening, despite the pain that it renders, be a moment of national renewal.
We cannot dream the American Dream as long as we are sleeping. In order to dream the American Dream, the dreamer must be passionately, powerfully, consciously awake.
Chapter 3 will be emailed tomorrow!
Wow, powerful.
I L♡VE Your spiritual insight into politics.
but I would also like to see you consider the skewed image of our American founders, as written by those who polish the pottery AFTER it has been fired and glazed....
our American founder and resistance history is grittier and unclear than all of us were taught.
please check out or contact Tad Stoermer https://youtube.com/@tad.stoermer?si=tp3KoJsLm9WrQqGb
I would Love to see a conversation between the two of you!!!