Democratic concepts had been explored and tested not only in places like Venice but on this continent in the form of the Iroquois Confederacy before the first settlements of white immigrants from Europe. Democracy has been around for long before our Founding Fathers put quill to parchment. We just turned it into something
It has been a remarkable national and cultural journey. The evolution of this nation is a story like none other. We have been able to do things that were unimaginable at an earlier time. We took ideas from others and built on them. Industrialization was an economic engine that reshaped the world and our thinking about the world. Aviation paved the way for space exploration. Electricity opened the path to all kinds of modern amenities and on into development of the digital space.
There seems to be no limit to what can be accomplished under this system of government.
One of my favorite quotations is from the movie "The American President" with Michael Douglas and Annette Benning. In an impromptu walk-on during a White House briefing, he says,
America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You've gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say, "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours." You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms.
Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.
That brief statement capsulizes the essence, the strength, the difficulty of democracy.
But, ugliness has been given a stage in America.
- Part of the ugliness is the notion that compromise is a dirty work -- a bad thing.
- Part of the ugliness is the political drive to win at any cost.
- Part of the ugliness is "winning" by setting us against them. In particular, when it is defining "them" as immigrants when in fact we are all -- save for the remnant of the Native American tribes-- immigrants to this land.
- Part of the ugliness is using the concept of patriotism to put one notion of love of country against a different notion of love of country.
