Let's remember our faith
What are we to do as Americans in this awful moment before the storm?
What the American people have chosen is frightening, and soon the bill will come due. There is nothing permanent in the shifting sands of American life, but there are some ideas, some notions that are enduring.
Faith is enduring, but also fleeting. It can be worn down and rubbed raw, stolen or hijacked, lost or renewed. In this moment when the loss stings and anger is high about what is to come it is easy to tune out and give up over issues that, in the end, none of us has direct control over. Submission becomes easy because fighting is exhausting. Yet, some things cannot be forgotten or surrendered because they cannot be dimmed.
Justice is such a thing, and so is liberty.
Many people in this growing community honor me with a question for which I wish I had a better answer: what should I do? How can I make a difference?
Read.
I think about this photograph often:
The United States was a nation of educated people who could read, think and understand complex issues. It was understood in America that great wisdom could be found among common people, who cared deeply about the connections between freedom, community, prosperity, faith, conscience and conviction. The pursuit of happiness is not a top-down mandate, but rather a bottom-up right that relies on some intangible qualities, such as common sense, common values, basic decency and shared responsibility.
Americans are a free people by nature, history, rights, and through victory, bloodshed and fierceness. Liberty has been sustained and expanded by the qualities that search for justice and appreciate the wisdom of restraint and the necessity of action. What we are and who we are are inexorably woven together. Sometimes they are in conflict, and other times they fit together perfectly, and have the power to create new horizons, new beginnings and new possibilities
Many of us have become idiotized, to the great detriment of us all. We live in an era in which the ability to control or manipulate people through technology and algorithms has delivered to the country a new birth of extremism, fueled by a rage as old as time.
Let’s face something that is deeply true and acknowledge its reality. Let’s remember that this reality has many causes and even more fathers. Let’s remember that English is a wonderful language, which has delivered to us in this moment an infinite array of possible combinations to communicate something essential — dare I say vital, critical and necessary in this moment of luminescent hypocrisy and brilliant nuttery.
It is this:
Pete Hegseth is an imbecile.
Tulsi Gabbard is a dupe.
Matt Gaetz is a predatory punk suffering from acute affluenza.
Robert F. Kennedy is a conspiracy nut with a talent for spreading pain and suffering.
None of these people are fit for any position of public trust.
They have been nominated because America is suffering from a crisis of faith and a crisis of knowledge. Trump thinks the US Senate is too weak, servile and corrupt to stop him from appointing the most unfit group of narcissistic misfits ever called to government service. Trump’s “F Troop” is a shocking marker of national decay.
Below is a speech by Judge Learned Hand, one of America’s greatest jurists.
The title of the speech is “The Spirit of Liberty.” It was delivered in 1944 at a moment of war, and at the edge of an era that has played out. It is an era that is gasping its last breaths as I type these words. The era is ending, but the wisdom endures. I hope you will heed it and appreciate it.
What has made us exceptional as a nation is not what Trump is selling. Instead, it is the wisdom to seek something better from what had come before — even when what was next had not yet been imagined.
Let’s remember our faith. Soon we will be called to practice it.
We have gathered here to affirm a faith, a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion. Some of us have chosen America as the land of our adoption; the rest have come from those who did the same. For this reason we have some right to consider ourselves a picked group, a group of those who had the courage to break from the past and brave the dangers and the loneliness of a strange land. What was the object that nerved us, or those who went before us, to this choice? We sought liberty; freedoms from oppression, freedom from want, freedom to be ourselves. This we then sought; this we now believe that we are by way of winning. What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.
What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest. And now in that spirit, that spirit of an America which has never been, and which may never be; nay, which never will be except as the conscience and courage of Americans create it; yet in the spirit of that America which lies hidden in some form in the aspirations of us all; in the spirit of that America for which our young men are at this moment fighting and dying; in that spirit of liberty and of America I ask you to rise and with me pledge our faith in the glorious destiny of our beloved country.
Rosa Park quotes:
“I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes the fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.”
“Memories of our lives, of our works and our deeds will continue in others.”
“I believe we are here on the planet Earth to live grow up and do what we can to make this world a better place for all people to enjoy freedom.”
Thank you, Steve Schmidt. Faith! We will pick up the flag and move forward, together. Freedom!
Credit card debt for Americans is now over $1 trillion. We live in feudal times, thanks to people like Ronald Reagan who preached distrust in government and gluttony for the wealthy. Is it any wonder that rabid populists have taken over?