America is Advanced Citizenship By E.P. Unum
America, my friends is 244 years old. In the recorded history of mankind, that is but a tiny blip on the radar screen of civilizations. But in that tiny piece of time, America has emerged as the single greatest example of democracy known to man.
We have built the largest economy, created incredible wealth, pioneered breakthrough medical discoveries, put men on the moon, and began the exploration of the universe and distant planets. Our discoveries have benefited all of humankind. And, in these 244 years, we have engineered the world’s greatest standard of living and have become the shining beacon of freedom people aspire to.
And yet there are people living among us who say we are an evil nation, who teach our children that, who denigrate the principles upon which our nation was created. It is a disgusting, ungrateful, and perverse view of who we are. These people ignore the fact that over one million people per year immigrate into our country every year! If we were such an evil place, why do so many people want to come and live here? Many who complain about America suggest that capitalism and the free enterprise system have “failed us’ and need to be replaced with socialism, an economic system that has never worked in any nation that has tried it. Makes one wonder whether it is socialism that is the focus or the quest for abject power and control over the factors of production and the lives of our citizens. I’m afraid it is the latter.
This much is wisdom: Nature is ultimately unchangeable and humans are not God. Totalitarianism will never win in the end—but it can win long enough to destroy a civilization like ours in America. Like cancer, it grows and envelops vital organs until they shut down and death ensues. That is what is ultimately at stake in the fight we find ourselves in today. It is not difficult to see today the totalitarian impulse among powerful forces in our politics and culture. We can see it in the rise and imposition of “lying, pomposity, smugness and group think” ( to paraphrase Fox TV Commentator Tucker Carlson.)
We can see it by the indefensible and incoherent controls imposed on businesses and our daily lives by power-hungry politicians like Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City, Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey and Governor Gavin Newsome of California, among others. And we can see it in the increasing attempts to rewrite our history and the despicable efforts to indoctrinate our children with lessons like those contained in the “1619 Project”.
“An informed patriotism is what we want,” Ronald Reagan said toward the end of his Farewell Address as President in January 1989. “Are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world?”
Then he issued a warning.
“Those of us who are over 35 (then) or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought at Guadalcanal or Tarawa or in Korea or the jungles of Vietnam, or the family who lost someone on the beaches of Normandy or Hue City. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-sixties.”
But not anymore.
“Now, some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that reinforcing an appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And, as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism just seems to be no longer the style. . . . We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs protection, and it requires that people give back to society as much or more than they take from it. America is advanced citizenship.”
“So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important—why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, four years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father, who’d fought on Omaha Beach. . . . [S]he said, “we will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.” Well, let’s help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit.”
President Ronald Reagan said these words over thirty years ago. They are prescient.
American schoolchildren today learn two things about Thomas Jefferson: that he wrote the Declaration of Independence and that he was a slaveholder. This is stunted and dishonest teaching about Jefferson.
What do our schoolchildren not learn? They don’t learn what Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” he wrote in that book regarding the contest between the master and the slave. “The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.” If schoolchildren learned that, they would see that Jefferson was a complicated man, like most of us.
They don’t learn that when our nation first expanded, it was into the Northwest Territory, and that slavery was forbidden in that territory. They don’t learn that the land in that territory was ceded to the federal government from Virginia, or that it was on the motion of Thomas Jefferson that the condition of the gift was that slavery in that land be eternally forbidden. If schoolchildren learned that, they would come to see Jefferson as a human being who inherited things and did things himself that were terrible, but who regretted those things and fought against them. And they would learn, by the way, that on the scale of human achievement, Jefferson ranks very high.
There’s just no question about that. If, for no other reason, than he was a prime agent in founding the first republic dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
The astounding thing, after all, is not that some of our Founders were slaveholders. There was a lot of slavery back then, as there had been for all of recorded time. Slavery exists today in 2020. The astounding thing—the miracle, even, one might say—is that these slaveholders founded a republic based on principles designed to abnegate slavery.
To present young people with a full and honest account of our nation’s history is to invest them with the spirit of freedom. It is to teach them something more than why our country deserves their love, although that is good in itself. It is to teach them that the people in the past, even the great ones, were human and had to struggle. And by teaching them that, we prepare them to struggle with the problems and evils in and around them.
Teaching them instead that the past was simply wicked and that now they are able to see so perfectly the right, we do them a disservice and fit them to be slavish, incapable of developing sympathy for others or worse, capably undergoing trials on their own. We cannot change the past, but we can certainly learn from it.
“Depriving the young of the spirit of freedom will deprive us all of our country. It could deprive us, finally, of our humanity itself. This cannot be allowed to continue. It must be stopped.”
I am reminded of a speech given by Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the “Iron Lady” at Hillsdale College. Speaking about ancient Athens, the cradle of democracy, Mrs. Thatcher reminded us all just how fragile freedom really is.
“In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.” Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher Words to Remember.
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