Mid-Life Crisis
It’s Independence Day, the Fourth of July, 2022. The United States is two hundred and forty-six years old. History is relative in the US, two hundred and forty-six seems like such a long time. But, in the course of history, two and a half centuries really isn’t very long. Just look at the history of the United Kingdom, or China, or France, or the Navajo. While the United States is no longer a “young” country, we probably are just reaching “middle age”.
America is celebrating a birthday on a national scale, kind of like a man turning forty-seven. It’s those years of “mid-life crisis”, when the identity and goals of young manhood are now in a wholly different perspective. How do you know that your “younger life” is over? I knew it when they put a stent in my heart (at forty-seven), though it took a few more years to sink in.
So the United States is trying to buy a leather jacket and a Corvette. We are, in fact, looking back to the “good old days” as if the future will never live up to the past. We are a nation struggling with changes, wistfully wishing (for the privileged few) that we could be something we once thought we were.
False Utopia
In the first month of these “Our America” essays, I wrote an essay called “Trump World and the Beaver”. It was all about the so-called utopia of the 1950’s, when I was born, and the world was simpler. “Leave it to Beaver” was a show about the life of a white, suburban kid named Theodore, nicknamed “the Beaver”. His Dad wore a suit and tie to work (he took the tie and suit coat off, and put a sweater on for dinner) and his Mom cleaned the house in a dress and pearls.
It was an idyllic life of baseball games and adventures with brother Wally. Mr. Cleaver always had the wise answer to the boys’ problems, and Mrs. Cleaver with never flustered, and always perfectly coiffed. But that idyllic life was for the chosen few. While Wally and the Beaver were growing up on TV, young Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi. Rosa Parks was refusing to sit in the back of the bus, and Martin Luther King was emerging as the leader of a national movement.
America was preparing for the dramatic changes of the 1960’s, from civil rights to opposition to the Vietnam War, to the whole “hippie” movement. A decade after “the Beaver”, life in America was changed forever.
Life Changes
Like any life changes, it wasn’t all for the good, or for the bad. The United States became more diverse, more “free”, more willing to change. We set out on a path whose ultimate result was an America that would be fully integrated, not just “technically” in schools and swimming pools, but in life. Kids of all races would listen to music of all cultures, and the racial-cultural-religious background of a person would not matter.
It would be easy here to insert Dr. King’s, “…judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”. It was a goal he established on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. But fifty-nine years after that marker in history, we forget that in the speech he also said:
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men — yes, Black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.
America’s Promise
It’s Independence Day. And the United States still hasn’t made that check good for so many of our citizens. Instead of “doubling down” to clear that debt, a portion of our nation is trying to roll the clock back to no longer honor the bill. So while we celebrate our birthday, Independence Day, we should realize that we are a nation defined by obligation. The United States, was founded in concepts rather than in people. The notably flawed Founding Fathers were able to create concepts beyond their personal failings. And it is to those principles that we should look in our “mid-life” crisis.
Like Dr. King, we should look to the promise of the Declaration of Independence, our founding document:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It was on this day, two hundred and forty-six years ago, that the founders of our nation agreed to our Independence, based on those words.
And we should look to the promise of the Constitution, establishing the fact and the goals of our Union eleven years later:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
More Perfect
It’s my favorite phrase in America’s founding documents: “…a more perfect Union”. It’s the promise of America – that while our Union may be “perfect”, our goal is continually make it “more perfect”. And it is in the “more perfecting” that we are committed to struggle, through war and rebellion, economic failure and success, and even the evil manipulations of men intent on gaining power.
So America, blow out the candles, you’ve still got the “wind” to put out all two hundred and forty-six. Forget the leather jacket and Corvette – the President already has them. And make the wish, that we shall look to a future of “more perfecting”, rather than a past that really only existed for the few. We are an America of the many, and we need to make our “checks” good.
Happy Fourth of July.
