Screeds
Sunday, September 26, 2004
An American Credo
December 21, 2002
Each year should bring something new, some acquisition of knowledge, discipline, or empathy that enlarges the mind, strengthens the character, and readies the soul for its final journey.
2002 has been a year of trial. War abroad, a climate of fear at home, prolonged economic malaise and uncertainty over how best to secure our lives in a regime of freedom have been its principal characteristics.
But don’t all generations believe that they live in a time of trial? How is our situation more difficult, or even different, from those of generations past?
Perhaps it isn’t. Yet I feel America is undergoing something important at this time, something fundamental enough to merit being called a rebirth. If it isn’t our first and is unlikely to be our last, still it matters to us who are living through it.
Our nation has been in some degree of turmoil since before World War II. We were in the throes of a terrible depression, the complete remaking of our government, and the principles on which it was founded, when we were drawn into that world-ravaging conflict. When the war was over, our domestic problems were still there, waiting to be solved. Some of them haven’t been solved yet.
We persevere. We deal with difficulties and uncertainties of many kinds, and we press on. Other nations take no thought for our troubles, but call on us whenever they sense that we might rise to their aid—and as often as not, excoriate us for what we’ve done immediately thereafter.
It’s part of Americans’ concept of ourselves to come to the aid of the beleaguered and oppressed, no matter where they might be. It’s our national uniqueness, beyond all comparison in the history of the world.
A thing like that doesn’t arise out of the ether. It’s the fruit of a long development of fundamental ideas and attitudes. It arises from who we are as a people, and from our all-but-unadmitted credo: the intellectual and ethical tenets we live by. We are rediscovering that credo, even as I write.
We believe in ourselves, in our goodness and trustworthiness, in the constructive nature of our deeds, not because we’re the most arrogant bastards ever to walk the Earth, as some would have it, but because we have confidence in our foundations:
- Individual liberty and responsibility.
- Private property and free enterprise.
- The rule of objective law, to which our officials themselves are subject, that no whim can set aside.
- Tolerance for nonviolent personal practices and views, no matter how they diverge from the norm.
- Ultimate sovereignty residing in the individual, private citizen, as exemplified in the jury system.
The theory was always appealing, and two centuries of practice have confirmed it magnificently. Competing schemes based on class stratifications, “vanguard elites” and hivelike collectivisms have gone down to defeat, unable even to feed their own subjects. Meanwhile, ours produced a splendor unmatched in all of history, and a people willing to shoulder the burdens of the world at need.
Mark LaRochelle of the National Journalism Center once remarked to me that it was a great tragedy how few Americans knew their country in any comparative sense, how little they appreciated its uniqueness and virtues. Given the breadth of our land, and how much it has to offer, that might have been unavoidable, yet Mark’s comment was spot-on. Few Americans receive enough exposure to the regimentation and foolishness that marks other nations and cultures to appreciate the freedom and achievements of our own.
Are there blots on our shield? A few—but far fewer than accrue to any other nation in history, including any that exist today. Are there ways in which we’ve strayed from the principles that made us? Yes, indeed, and I spend no little time decrying them here—yet the core of those principles, and the ordinary American’s attachment to them, remains unshaken though rained with shot and shell. Our people know right from wrong, and given enough time will tell them apart infallibly.
America is still the beacon of liberty and justice. She is still the last, best hope of mankind.
For 2003, among our other New Year’s Resolutions, perhaps we might include a few of more than personal impact:
- To expect full personal responsibility for his well-being, and the well-being of his dependents, from every ablebodied adult American, and to be unsparing in our criticism of those who slough their proper burdens.
- To demand opennness and individual accountability from our officials, that every government decision of any weight be traceable to its makers, that they must justify all such decisions according to Constitutional principles and strictures, and that they must admit when they’ve been wrong.
- To insist on public respect for that which is properly private: private property, private enterprise, private decisionmaking, private assumption of risks and enjoyment of rewards, and private management of personal and family responsibilities.
- To reject the current governmental hostility toward our dominant religions, Christianity and Judaism, as antithetical to our founding doctrines and our people’s character.
- To hold ourselves above the storm of “world opinion,” so often directed by persons who hate what we stand for and never cease to condemn it, no matter what benefits they’ve reaped from our magnanimity and ready acceptance of tasks no other people will confront. We are an infinite degree above our detractors. What rankles them is that they know it, too.
These ideas aren’t new. They’re the concepts that have underpinned our national life. They made the American experiment what it is. They’ve made us what we are. The time to reassert them, openly and proudly, is upon us today.
May all the joy of this most joyous of seasons be yours. I’ll see you all in 2003.
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