I am sure that we can all write out own lists of problems in our country, and many of us could even rank them in order of importance. I suspect that what I call our biggest problem won’t even make most lists.
Why?
It’s not the kind of problem that would make the nightly
news. You can’t put it on a cell phone
video or explain it in a soundbite. You
need to look at all of our problems and then step back and survey the whole picture
of what is happening in our country
The biggest single problem facing our country today is
answering the question: what is America?
Historically, countries formed from descendants of common
ancestors. We have seen a lot of
migration in the last some decades, but when Africans move to Italy, we don’t
call them Italians. We still call them
Africans.
But people move to the United States from all over the
world, and they become citizens, and we call them Americans.
That’s because America was built on an idea or set of ideas,
such that ethnic roots are irrelevant.
But more and more people in America can’t tell you what those ideas
are. We don’t teach them in our schools
anymore, and we certainly don’t teach them to the millions of people who move
to our country every year.
So if we don’t know what our founding principles are, we
will create or imagine other ones, and our country will change into something
it is not and was never intended to be.
And we won’t even know it. And
the things that made us what we are will cease to exist. It will be like we were taken over by a
foreign power, a coup, but nobody will even know. It will happen slowly, over generations, each
new generation growing up with a new normal, until one day it is gone. And most people won’t even know it.
These ideas are five in number, and they are given in the
Declaration of Independence.
The first idea, or maybe I should say proposition. An idea sounds vague and not necessarily
grounded in reality. The first
proposition is that all people are created equal.
In what sense are any two people equal? We are all unique and are different from
everyone else in innumerable ways: looks, intelligence, aptitudes, abilities,
personalities, etc. But note that it
says created equal. It is not talking
about physical characteristics.
In the context of our country’s founding, it is the
statement that nobody has the divine or natural right to rule over other
people. We forget today that at the time
nations were ruled by kings. Kings
weren’t elected or chosen by the people.
It was a position they were born into.
Our Founders said, no, we are all created equal. We don’t have rulers.
Yes, but you will say, they had slavery. Isn’t that one people ruling over
another? Indeed it is, and we ended up
fighting a very costly civil war to end that.
People don’t always live up to their ideals, but the first step is
establishing them. We will talk more
about this in part 2.
Secondly, the same God who created us equal also endowed us
with unalienable rights. These rights
are how we define liberty and freedom, by our ability to exercise these rights.
These rights come from God and precede and supersede
government. Government didn’t give them,
and government can’t take them away.
When the Founders created our country’s new Constitution,
they debated whether these rights should be enumerated in it. They were concerned 1) that people would come
to think that these rights came from the government at some point in the future
and not from God, and 2) that these were all the rights that people were
endowed with.
Eventually they decided to add them to the Constitution, but
by way of amendments. The first ten
amendments to our Constitution are called the Bill of Rights. These rights were things you could do without
the government’s permission or regulation.
Thirdly, these rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness.
Fourthly, they said that government exists to secure those
rights. Remember this point. The role of government is a key issue today.
And, lastly, when the government does not secure our rights,
it is the right of the people to either change the government or replace it.
But what does all this mean, especially today in a
politically divided country?
We will look at this in the remaining articles.
