East of the Vietnam War Memorial

I am east of the Vietnam War memorial wall now.  I had walked from F street and 12^th to the Washington monument, then up past the reflecting pool to the Lincoln memorial.  To the south is the Jefferson rotunda and, to the north, the White House.  Behind me is the Capital building. 

Washington, for all its power and corruption is still a spiritual place, steeped in an ideology of justice and freedom. 

People with lofty ideals are never-the-less the product of their times. They are tied to the outright prejudices and lingering doubts of their ancestors.  To allow for something less than the ideal is sometimes seen as hypocrisy.  But ideals are not meant to reflect what is, but what can be.  To voice what you wish to be true, even when your own behavior subverts achieving it, is a step forward to manifesting a better future.

Lincoln presided over a country in civil war.  A war about economics, about what is and is not permissible to buy and sell;  about whether certain people can serve as just another means of production.  It was a war that was meant to define who the we of “we the people” were.  A defining that continues today to establish those differences that can be tolerated among a peolpe who call themselves a nation.

But there comes a time when an idea, like slavery, can no longer coexist with the evolving thought of the times; when a practice deviates from a multitude of other closely held values such that the tectonic plates of a culture shift, and those who persist in their outmoded beliefs are toppled from power.

At any point in time, the prevailing culture of America is always rife with fault lines that demarcate transitions from old to new, from that which was accepted or tolerated to that which is increasingly perceived as undesirable as well as those things that were once undesirable but are now perceived as benign or in some way beneficial.

At the core of our understanding are the notions our founders called out in the preamble to the U.S. constitution:

• To form a more perfect union
• To establish justice
• To insure domestic tranquility
• To secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity

If these are the ideals we share, if this is the nation we seek to be, then whatever political acrimony of the day must be relegated to a squabble, a spat, a disagreement about how we achieve these loftier goals. 

 (November 7, 2001)