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    Happy 241st Birthday America!

    By Dr. Arthur Lavin

    Dear Families,

    Happy 241st Birthday America!

    I thought I would take this moment as we pause to celebrate the Fourth of July, to say Happy Birthday to our country!

    I hope you don’t mind that this posting will be historical, I love history, and find the founding and history of our country deeply compelling, in no small part because it’s my country, but also given the bold notion of our founding that a national society could reach for justice.

    Every Fourth of July I am reminded of three great themes of our nation’s history- its founding, Lincoln, and our continued struggle to get it right.

    The Founders and the Fourth of July

    When I think of the Fourth of July, 1776, I think about the very odd notion of a group of wealthy men deciding to rise up against their king, and to propose the radical notion that a government should be run by its people and reflect their interests and best wishes.   It is very unusual.

    Most of human history has been defined by a strong man and his family or clan lording over everyone else.  We as humans simply seemed built to follow the strongest person in our clan.   That rule by power concentrates power and along with it wealth.  The chief and the king often had more of the hunt and more of everything else.  Most societies across history concentrated power so extremely that vast classes of people were forced to live in slavery or very oppressive servitude.

    The Founders were students of the Enlightenment, a time of great intellectual curiosity , of honest observation of how things work, with a thrilling excitement that if we used calm reason, we could find a solution to any problem.  It is no coincidence whatsoever that one of the greatest of our Founders was considered one of the great scientists of the age.  His work formed a foundation for our understanding of electricity, even to this day, when many words we use for electricity were coined by him around 1776.  That is, of course, Benjamin Franklin.

    Our Declaration of Independence continues to thrill us and the world with its powerful call to have a government reflect the equal voices of all its citizens.  Jefferson helped draft it, but as Danielle Allen writes in her excellent book Our Declaration, it was really the product of intense committee work followed by input from many, many people across all 13 colonies.  It was a group effort.

    It is the heart of the Declaration that I think we celebrate on the Fourth of July- that all people do indeed exist with equal power to have an impact on their lives.  That the days when only the strongest can rule, and that only the strongest get their interests met, need to come to an end.

    Lincoln and the Fourth of July

    If the Declaration is the first theme of the day that comes to mind on the Fourth of July, then Abraham Lincoln is the second.  You might ask, how can Lincoln be a theme, he is after all a person?   I would answer that there is something about Lincoln that has captured human imagination.  More books have been published about Lincoln than any other person who ever lived, with only one exception, Jesus.

    What is it about Lincoln?

    I am sure the answer could fill many, many books, but my brief answer would be that he knew our nation was wrong, knew what had to be changed, but had the power, courage, and savvy, to find a path to make that change happen.

    He knew slavery was wrong, he said so, “If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong.”  He also knew that the US Constitution made it legal.  That he and no other American had no right to simply abolish it (as the abolitionists demanded).  He also knew that if he overthrew the Constitution to end the outrage of slavery, the democracy would crumble, and he still lived in a time when almost no one lived in a democracy.  So if the Constitution were overturned, we would become like most other countries, ruled by the strongest thug, not by the people.

    On top of all that, he was perhaps our shrewdest politician.  He gathered groups that detested each other to gain power, he bargained with them and formed unlikely coalitions to achieve group actions that were the only path to ending slavery.  His coalition of course included all abolitionists, but also very centrist folk, and believe it or not, the deeply racist Know Nothings.  Without one of these groups, he would have never been elected, and slavery would likely have gone on for many, many, many more years.

    Why did he work so hard, why did he tie together such mutually hating groups, why did he refuse to let the Union crumble?

    I believe it was because he knew that human societies tend strongly toward tyranny, toward the rule of the toughest man and his family, concentrating power and wealth and leaving all other people’s interests in the dust.   He knew that because nearly every country in the world did live this way at that time.

    His devotion to democracy and skill in making it work and even end its greatest stain, slavery, came to full view around the Fourth of July, in 1863.  That was one day after the three day Battle of Gettysburg.  A very close affair which had the North lost, would have almost certainly let the Confederacy survive and nurture slavery in North America for who knows how many decades.

    In November of 1863, Lincoln summarized the lesson of the Fourth of July in words nearly every American is inspired by to this day:

    It begins with:

    “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

    He says in the middle:

    “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure”

    And it ends with:

    “…that this nation, under God, 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.”

    On this Fourth of July, what Lincoln says to me is that on that day in 1776, a nation stood up claiming it could be organized around the principle that everyone’s voice should hold equal power in determining what the nation does.   That this notion was far from obvious and in 1863 was not clear it would work.   He closes with one of the best statement of just what democracy is, how it differs from tyranny, democracy was created by all the people, that exists for the benefit of all the people.

    Us and the Fourth of July

    Of course, saying these wonderful things does not make them so.  From the first step away from monarchy, the United States, like all nations, has had to struggle with the injustice that the reality of our society creates.  This is true of any group of humans since there were first humans, and it is certainly true today.

    Our greatest crimes were of course the crime of slavery and the crime of genocide against the people first here.   I believe we still have not addressed this legacy, it haunts us and continues to define the American experience.

    I will hold off thinking of other examples of injustice in American history, and in today’s American realities.

    But as I think of those challenges, I am inspired by our Founders and by Lincoln to keep in mind that human societies very strongly tend to drift towards tyranny.  For whatever reason, it is by far our preferred state.   I don’t know anyone but the tyrant who would say so, but the fact that so many countries drift in this direction teaches me there is something in our nature that is drawn to the tyrant.

    That leaves really two choices for most societies of humanity- democracy which is the rule of the people in all their wild difference, and the controlled unity of voice of they tyrant.

    America and we Americans are really no different than any other group of people in that we too are a group of people.  There is nothing that will prevent us from going the way of the tyrant.  The Confederacy tried very hard to move us in that direction, and came very, very close.  That threat remains in every day, including our own.

    So on this Fourth of July, I go to a barbecue, see fireworks, fly the flag, enjoy parades, and light sparklers with the hope that we now will do what every generation has done since 1776, chosen democracy over the allure of the tyrant.  It’s messy.  All those voices, all those conflicts.

    But you know, going back to the beginning, Madison had this image of what a land free of a king, run by the people, how it work, how it get things done and not descend into tyranny (they talked a lot about that worry).  His image was that people would gather in Congress and there would be a tumult of dozens if not hundreds of different desires and plans, most completely incompatible with each other, but every so often, one idea would show up that a majority of the people gathered would agree needed to happen, and it would happen.

    That was the idea.  I still like it.  It explains all the controversy, the disagreements, and the notion that out of many, many purposes and priorities, the conversation amongst those who disagree will yield a next step, a reasonable next step, and problems get solved.

    As with every generation of Americans, we join with all others challenged with how to make this democracy concept work.

    I join with the memories of the Founders and of Lincoln, really all who came before, and with all who are with us now filled with hope the notion of democracy will not only continue to take hold in our nation, but thrive, and work.

    Happy 241st Birthday America, we hope everyone has a happy Fourth of July holiday, we have lots to celebrate and lots to do.

    To your health,
    Dr. Arthur Lavin

     

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