Schrödinger’s Country: Justice and the Capitol Assault. This Is (Part of) Who We Are

 

         I like to consider myself a kind, patient, caring father; after all, I have won Daphne Stevens’s “Father of the Year” award three times now. However, there are times when I am exasperated and yell, times when I am uninvolved and just want to play on my phone, times when I am tired and just want to feed my kids cereal and send them to bed. Like it or not, those moments are part of my legacy with my kids, and while I have had many successes, I’ve also had failures and it is important to be honest about it. The history of our country and citizens is the same way, so when people look at the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6^th and say, “That is not who we are!” I believe they are wrong in their picture of America, at least partially.

          The history of America is full of contradictions from the very beginning.  We have Puritans fleeing religious persecution and settling in Massachusetts only to exile Roger Williams for heresy15 years later.  We have Thomas Jefferson writing “All men are created equal” while much of the population owned slaves. 

We have the freeing of slaves and granting citizenship to African Americans which culminated in 17 Black congressmen in the 1870s only to be stymied by Jim Crow laws that kept them out of Congress for 50 years after. We have America known to the world as a land of opportunity to immigrants while Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma was bombed and burned to the ground 1921. We spent 4 years fighting the evilest regime in World War 2 while imprisoning hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans in camps that were “lite versions” of those we were liberating the Jews and others from. We have school desegregation followed by white flight resulting in an education system that is more segregated today than 40 years ago as many African American children are still relegated to poverty-stricken schools.  And, we have had the first African American President followed by a man whose political career began with him aggressively and falsely spreading the lies about President Obama’s birth and legitimacy.

          Make no mistake, the United States of America lives much more closely to its ideals today than it did at the beginning of its history. However, our journey on the road of progress in America has been less of a march than a drunken, rambling stumble.  Every step has been fought against and while those great reformers represent what it is to be American, those who have worked against them through legal means and violence have also been part of the American story.

          We have much to be proud of. We have been a beacon of freedom, a land of opportunity, and a role model for much of the world in numerous ways. In many respects it would be easier just to celebrate our accomplishments instead of reconciling with our sins. But as Amanda Gorman wrote, “Being American is more than the pride we inherit.  It is the past we step into and how we repair it.” Think back to my examples in the second paragraph; how many times did we learn the “good” in elementary school but not the “bad” until much later, if at all.  It is not about demeaning the United States, it’s about honesty.  When we ignore past evils, we are left unprepared and miss the early signs of another wave rising to fight against expanding the American Dream. We miss injustice has adapted to new laws and requires further action as slavery turned into Jim Crow which turned into mass incarceration. We are happy to rest, thinking we have arrived at the Most Perfect Union instead of fighting against those disparities that don’t affect us directly in order to continue to make it More Perfect.

          The strongest marriages and families are open and honest in celebrating successes and mourning failures. It is important to learn about failures not because we hate America, but because we need to love America as adults. We want the best for America; we want it to live it to its loftiest ideals. To do that, we need to confront our full history and deal with the echoes of where we have fallen short that still impact the lives of so many today. Unity without justice is safety for the strong; moving forward we need to hold the individuals responsible who fostered the environment that led to the Capitol assault. To not hold them accountable would be inviting history to repeat itself.