American Civics: The Ideal and the Reality Colliding

           Found myself considering Civics in my last post. What would American Civics look like right now? How could we, pun intended, avoid white-washing our history as a nation? Where might we even begin?

          How about an American truism and an American virtue? The truism is that ‘all humans are created equal’ and the virtue is that of personal and collective responsibility?

          The reality is that as we have progressed historically, the pool of ‘all’ who are created equal has expanded. Often the theory has expanded more rapidly than the reality, but it has expanded. Color, race, gender, ethnicity, how many other tangibles and intangibles have affected our definition of ‘all’?

          What is this virtue? A sense of responsibility? A sense that is ACTED upon? That is going to be a little more interesting. Responsibility to whom? To what?

          I believe that the first step is to accept responsibility for our past where we intentionally excluded others from ‘all’ in our consideration of equality. We need to accept responsibility for slavery, accept responsibility for events as what happened at Wounded Knee, for Japanese internment, for abuse aimed at perceived people of Chinese origin for Covid, and accept responsibility for the back drops to the Black Lives Matter and the Me Too movements.

          Yes, All Lives Matter, but we, as a nation, need to take responsibility for the reality that skin color is going to impact whose life matters MORE!

          I wonder if one of the pieces that stands in the way of our collective responsibility is the question of restitution. How much of the physical nation would we be morally responsible to ‘give back’ to someone else? To Mexico? To the First Nations (Canadian influence)? Would taking responsibility mean questioning France’s legitimacy in offering up the Louisiana Purchase? Or Russia offering up Alaska?

          What about matters of reparations? Like for slavery? I wonder how much of this kind of fear and uncertainty adds root to white supremacy movements? Whites were supreme when we did so many horrible and terrible things for White profit and advancement. Is there truly any way that we can accept responsibility and walk that back?

          Or maybe we fear that the truth will be that America is built on a house of cards, morally speaking.

          Or maybe we know that at present, there is only lip-service being paid to the notion that all are created equal and that a huge restructuring of our society, our economy, and our culture will need to happen to live into a reality that all are equal?

          Can’t say for sure. But for our Civics to be anything more than an idealized lie, we need to take seriously that all humans are created equal. And we need to take seriously our individual and national responsibility for when and where that did not happen and still doesn’t happen.