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The true foundations for those buildings are not brick and stone, but our Constitution, our rule of law, our traditions, our work ethic, our empathy, our pragmatism, and our basic decency. As I have seen over the years, when we cultivate these instincts, we soar. When we sow seeds of division, hatred, and small-mindedness, we falter.
George Washington, in his famous Farewell Address, warned future generations “to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”
It is important not to confuse “patriotism” with “nationalism.” As I define it, nationalism is a monologue in which you place your country in a position of moral and cultural supremacy over others. Patriotism, while deeply personal, is a dialogue with your fellow citizens, and a larger world, about not only what you love about your country but also how it can be improved.
Unchecked nationalism leads to conflict and war. Unbridled patriotism can lead to the betterment of society. Patriotism is rooted in humility. Nationalism is rooted in arrogance.
To suppress the vote is to make a mockery of democracy. And those who do so are essentially acknowledging that their policies are unpopular. If you can’t convince a majority of voters that your ideas are worthy, you try to limit the pool of voters.
Gerrymandering isn’t just a recent phenomenon, though; the word was coined in 1812 when Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry went to such egregious lengths to redraw the state senate districts in his party’s favor that one district took on the shape of a salamander.
It is that age-old dilemma: Do you stay and try to change the church from within, or leave the church?
Dissent is most controversial during wartime because it is cast as unpatriotic and dangerous to the national cause. But that is precisely the time when a democracy should be asking itself difficult and uncomfortable questions.
The role of dissent is to force all of us to question our dogmas and biases. It is to stretch the spectrum of discourse.
America works best when new thoughts can emerge to compete, and thrive, in a marketplace of ideas. It’s a testimony to the wisdom of those who founded our republic and to the courage of all the dissenters who have come forward ever since.
Orwell understood that a government that is beyond the reach of accountability has little incentive to tell the truth. Indeed, its power may arise from the obliteration of objective facts. In the world of 1984, contradictory statements lose all sense of context and we are left with preposterous slogans: “War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength.” And yet Orwell asks us, if there is no one with the power to call out a lie as a lie, does it end up ceasing to be a lie?
our Founders understood that long-term accountability is more important than short-term stability.
In 1987, under President Ronald Reagan, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) abolished the Fairness Doctrine. In place since 1949, it had stipulated equal airtime for differing points of view.
Our first national motto was E pluribus unum, “From many, one.” From many states, we are one nation. And from many peoples, we should be one society.
The division of the ACLU that had taken up the custodians’ case was the Women’s Rights Project, which was cofounded by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the early ’70s.
No one wondered why those neighbors weren’t working, and no one passed moral judgments on their inability to fend for themselves. We understood that, in life, some are dealt aces, some tens, and some deuces.
It is perhaps not surprising that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan looked at a nation so traumatized and felt they could defeat us. Of course, history turned out differently.
Perhaps those authoritarians, who felt no empathy for their own people or those they conquered, underestimated the strength of our empathy.
Efforts to improve racial justice, labor rights, antipoverty programs, education, medical care, and many other needs began under President John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” and peaked with President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.”
In contrast, there have been moments where we reached out to one another as a nation, channeling what unites us rather than what separates us.
The incredibly successful investor Warren Buffett once speculated to a group of students about what would happen if, before birth, a genie gave us the opportunity to choose the political, economic, and social system into which we would be born. “What’s the catch?” he said. “One catch—just before you emerge [from the womb] you have to go through a huge bucket with seven billion slips, one for each human. Dip your hand in and that is what you get—you could be born intelligent or not intelligent, born healthy or disabled, born black or white, born in the U.S. or in Bangladesh, etc.
Buffett calls his construct “the ovarian lottery.”
This xenophobia at the time of World War II also affected how Americans viewed their fellow citizens. The internment of over a hundred thousand Japanese Americans came from misplaced fears that they might sabotage the war effort.
Patriotism and sacrifice know no ethnicity, race, or religion. And it has always been thus.
On October 3, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson traveled to Liberty Island in the harbor of New York and signed a sweeping change to America’s immigration laws. At the feet of the monumental statue that had welcomed so many of the huddled masses to our shores, Johnson undid a system that had been in place since the anti-immigrant backlash of the 1920s.
The preference for immigrants with family members already living in the United States was seen by many as a way to ensure that a predominantly white country stay that way. In reality it has had the opposite effect, as individuals from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and many other far-flung locations have immigrated to the United States, and their extended families have followed.
Two years earlier, President Reagan had said, in a presidential debate against Walter Mondale, “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and who have lived here even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.” Imagine: The patron saint of the modern conservative movement made the case for a concept that today would have him pilloried by the right-wing press and those cynical politicians who have learned to exploit division for their own electoral success.
We must find a way to defeat the forces of intolerance. If we do, we will emerge a better, stronger nation.
The legendary New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously quipped: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.”
As president, Jefferson would launch Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on a transcontinental expedition of discovery. Abraham Lincoln established the National Academy of Sciences. Theodore Roosevelt pioneered modern conservation. Franklin Roosevelt was the first president to appoint an official science adviser. And John F. Kennedy set the United States on the path to the moon.
Back in 1980, the science-fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’
In the name of balance, Dr. Wakefield was often pitted against reputable scientists who extolled the virtues and the safety of vaccines. But when you put two people on-screen to tell both “sides” of the story, in the viewer’s mind it immediately connotes fifty-fifty, even if you say it doesn’t.
Science is much more than the accumulation of facts; it is about the willingness to reevaluate our assumptions in the face of data to better see, understand, and improve our world.
In that sense, this new knowledge has all to do with honor and country, but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.
Hundreds of libraries across the nation, often among the most beautiful buildings in their communities, had been built over the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries through the largesse of the industrialist Andrew Carnegie.
The term “temple of learning” is often used today as a metaphor, but that is literally what Jefferson conceived of for his library.
This mission was enhanced greatly in 1870, when Congress stipulated that the library must receive two copies of every book, map, photograph, or other such work that was submitted for copyright in the United States.
As John Adams wrote, a republic “is a government of laws, and not of men.” A government of laws is a government of reason, and a government of books. That was true at our founding, and we must ensure that it remains a hallmark of our future.
But it is Foote’s original work that stands out to me as a mark of greatness.
His Academy Award – winning films Tender Mercies, about a country music singer seeking redemption, and The Trip to Bountiful, about an old woman returning one last time to the farmland of her youth,
Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit,” the chilling song about lynching.
The photograph has a name: Earthrise. The image was captured by astronaut William Anders of Apollo 8 on the first manned mission to orbit the lunar sphere, and the photograph can be seen as a mirror image for every vision humans had ever experienced up to that point.
In 1962, Rachel Carson, a trained marine biologist, published one of the most important books in American history, Silent Spring.
in 1970 we saw both the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency (signed into law by President Richard Nixon) and the first Earth Day (organized by Wisconsin’s Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson). The year also saw an important expansion of the Clean Air Act (first passed in 1963). The Clean Water Act would come in 1972.
those who deny climate change now will ultimately be “mugged by reality.”
Education was a gift, part of the panoply of blessings for having the good luck to be alive at that time and in those United States.
But there should be no dispute that if American schools don’t improve, America will lose its world leadership.
Few loom larger than Horace Mann, who argued that a truly free populace could not remain ignorant, and that communities must provide nonsectarian public schools, staffed by trained teachers and open to students of diverse backgrounds.
Normandy American Cemetery in France.
Another striking cemetery can be found halfway around the globe, in a volcanic crater in the hills above Honolulu. Nicknamed Punchbowl, it is a tribute to the sacrifice in our Pacific and Asian wars, not only World War II, but also Korea and Vietnam.
