Fourth of July 2021

On this fourth of July I know more than I did the last time we celebrated it…that is, before the pandemic.   During the pandemic, libraries were closed along with everything else, and I had to read what there was in the house.  What there were lots of in the house were biographies of U.S. Presidents.  Hefty and dense, but eye opening in their detail.  I began with the earliest presidents, Washington, Jefferson, Adamses and so on.  They were rich, well born and able, but also flawed and it is no surprise that the founding documents, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in particular, are what one would  expect…flawed but brilliant and farsighted

On this fourth I am appalled at the attitudes toward slavery, and women, and how unforgivably long it took for amendments to repair of the blind spots of the founders.  Abolishing slavery, granting the right to vote to women have both changed the laws, even if not always society’s attitudes.  We are still fighting those battles to make a nation that lives up to its original hope and promise.

On the other hand, I feel blessed and grateful for two things the founders got right and that remain at the heart of what is fine about America .  The first is that the Constitution itself lays out the procedure for amending it when found necessary.  This was a silent acknowledgement by the founders that they could not possibly gotten everything right the first time.

The other strength, although under constant push and pull, is a government that relies on three branches of government.  Because other countries had no check on a monarch or a tyrant’s power, they proved the weakness of unchecked men.  A legal system, a legislature, and an executive have produced a country as stable as a stool with at least three legs. 

So, on this fourth I tip my hat, metaphorically, to the founders, who in spite of their blindness and flaws saw the need to change in response to what they could not imagine, and that they saw that it would take a balance of centers of power to achieve it.

This year, I celebrate in a more informed way, a country I value for its strengths and for which I still have hope.