A Liberal Nation 0

Yesterday, I received an email in response to this post.

The email was from someone in the Netherlands.

(As usual, I was mildly surprised to find that someone other than the two or three friends and relatives that I know about actually reads this thing.)

The writer told me of watching the inauguration of the President of the United States on the telly vision, because

the inauguration of Mr. Obama was and is something very very moving.

One of my friends tried to claim that the writer was trying to blame his country’s problems on the United States.

That could not have been farther from the writer’s intentions.

His country doesn’t have problems to blame on the United States (other than the venality of Wall Street and the corruption of Republican Economic Theory, which has poisoned the financial system of the world and which richly deserves opprobrium).

As I have mentioned from time to time, the United States of America is the only nation founded on an idea: the idea of freedom under the rule of law.

That idea is a real thing, not just for those of us who, like me, can trace their ancestry in this land to before the French and Indian War, not just for all those who since then have come here, believing in that idea and looking for a better life, but also for persons who have never left their home countries to come here, but who still treasure the idea of freedom under the rule of law.

This has never been a perfect country.

It is a nation that has done really bad things.

Just for a moment, think of the Trail of Tears.

Indeed, I have ancestors who were slaveholders.

One of my relatives signed John Brown’s death warrant (not that John Brown was a prince among men).

But, all the while, one of the core beliefs of America has been the idea of perfectibility.

This does not mean a belief that the United States or, indeed, mankind, can ever become perfect (only the wingnuts and the nutcases believe that we have achieved perfection, whatever the hell that is), but rather the belief that a free people working together can continually find a better way.

And, with many failures and false steps and mistakes, throughout the two and a half centuries of its history as a nation, the United States of America has, with all it faults, encouraged others that the world could become better, because the United States believed that it could become better.

To paraphrase the Grateful Dead, it’s been a long, strange trip, but somehow, with each meandering, the United States has managed to get a little closer to getting it right.

With much bumbling and fumbling and with many sidetrips and false starts, over the years, the United States has faced its failures, faced its injustices, faced its darkest impulses, and tried to fix them. Yes, often with great struggle, but getting it right a little more often than getting it wrong.

As I have pointed out from time to time, I grew up under Jim Crow.

Those who you did not, whether it was because of where you grew up or because of when you grew up, cannot imagine what it was like.

And, as I look back on it, the scary thing was that, as I was growing up, it seemed normal. Because it was what we were used to.

It seemed normal to have separate schools, separate bathrooms, separate water fountains, based on the amount of carotene in the skin.

Indeed, I remember taking the bus with my mother to visit my grandmother in the red clay country of South Carolina sometime in the late 1950s. Somewhere in North Carolina, I think in Raleigh, the bus made a rest stop. I remember walking into the wrong–into the “colored”–waiting room.

Never in my life, and I am old and have made many mistakes, have I felt so out of place. I can only imagine from that experience what it was like to be black in a white world.

And I know my imaginings cannot approach the reality that black persons have dealt with for 300 years on these shores.

I would not wish the feeling I had at that moment on anyone.

For the last eight years, I have had that a similar feeling in my own country, in the country my ancestors fought to found.

Under a mad leadership, the United States of America has been insane for eight years.

Horrible, evil things, deeds which betrayed the blood and the ideals and the beliefs and the sacrifices of the Founders, have been done in our name by persons who are yet and will remain unrepentant.

And, as we look at those persons, we see that evil is banal, for they are ultimately banal, small, weak persons who, having no character, no principles, no understanding of the meaning of the ideals upon which this country was founded, seized on force as the only value.

They are gone from governance.

Not merely gone. Repudiated.

In their own way, the American people, sometimes sooner, too often later, have managed to figure out the right thing to do.

As I told my correspondent from the Netherlands, it is good to have my country back.

God be with President Barack Hussein Obama as he leads us back to sanity.