The (temporarily?) disrupted quest for a more perfect union

It seems customary to post something on the Fourth of July. I have to be honest, this year I can only do so in a half-hearted way. As I returned from my walk this morning, I thought "I really should post something up for the Fourth." I don't mind admitting that the thought made my heart sink. Not because I don't have a lot on my mind but because I have so much weighing on my mind as well as on my heart in this regard. It's not that I don't love my country. It's that I love my country a lot. While I am not an American exceptionalist, I am an American and, generally speaking, happy to be one.

I have to admit, this Independence Day finds me feeling pretty discouraged about the state of our increasingly tenuous union. Its tenuousness seems to increase each day. Instead of a united "us," a nation that largely agrees on ends but might differ as to means and is willing to compromise for the common good to accomplish to those ends, right now it's really us versus them. While I don't want to fall into the same trap I've just described, I can't help but note that we have a leader who seems to have no interest whatsoever in uniting the country. In my view, this is because his "power" and so his political strategy is very much rooted in dividing us and keeping us divided, exploiting the division for political gain. It fairness, this is nothing new in politics. What is new is the brazenness and ham-fisted way he does it. On the good side, it should alert all of us to this reality and help us to work collectively to overcome it.

While today is a holiday that I am happy to avail myself of (who doesn't want a day off?), I am taking a bit of a powder this year. As not only a veteran but a combat veteran, I am not enthusiastic in the least about the military parade. Again, I could say a number of things about this, but I will limit myself to observing that it seems like an attempt by the president to emulate the dictators for whom he has publicly expressed his admiration. I will also paraphrase President Eisenhower's reply when he was asked why the U.S. did not do impressive military parades like those put on in the Soviet Union: any nation that sees its strength mainly or exclusively in terms of its military might is weak. I find it disturbing that every national holiday has become a mixture of Armed Forces and Veteran's Day. Nonetheless, listening to the radio last week, I heard that the first U.S. service member born after 9/11/01 was killed in Afghanistan. If that doesn't cause you to be concerned, I don't know what would. And they called Vietnam a "quagmire."

While traveling for work a few weeks ago, I read the English translation of a wonderful book on the work of Simone Weil: Simone Weil: Attention to the Real. While I have long admired Weil, I must admit to never reading her in a systematic way. In a mere 81 pages, Robert Chenavier provides a very broad and surprisingly deep systematic treatment of her work. Just yesterday I ran across a very fine article ("Rooting for a New Nationalism") that treats Weil's work L’Enracinement (i.e., something like "Rootedness"- the need for roots), which was written towards the end of her short life in England on behalf of the Free French. The article focused on Weil's insistence that nationalism, at least as it is typically and historically conceived, needs to be redirected. Robert Zaretsky, the author of the pieces, notes:

Weil places human duties at the center of nationalism, and in so doing, displaces the nation from its traditional status among nationalists as the ultimate source of value. "The nation is a fact," she writes, "and a fact is not an absolute value." Unlike pride in one’s nation, which cannot be exported to other nations, compassion is, by its very nature, a universal impulse. To cultivate this sentiment is not only laudable but practical, because it tightens the bonds of fraternity both within and among nations

Zaretsky ends his piece by citing historian Samuel Moyn to the effect that "Human rights themselves wither when their advocates fail to cross the border into the language of duty; insofar as compliance with norms on paper is sought, the bearers of duties have to be identified and compelled to assume their burden."

I think the above observation applies directly to both the inhumane way the United States is treating captured immigrants, most of whom are refugees, along our southern border as well as to today's military parade. It also applies to our dealings with Iran, which tensions revolve around Iran's refusal to abide by an agreement on uranium enrichment that the U.S. sought to abrogate by walking away from it.

It also seems fitting on this Fourth of July to mention our deadly commitment to the proliferation of firearms contra all common sense. Referencing this year's 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, the Washington Post reported that between 1 January and 6 March 2019 more people were killed by firearms in the U.S. than died in the storming of the beaches of Normandy. Noting that the Post's piece was true, Snopes pointed out that one would actually have to extend the time period one day, to 7 March. The sharp spike in firearms over the past several years is what prompted retired Supreme Court Justice, John Paul Stevens, to argue for the repeal of the second amendment (see "Repeal the Second Amendment"). Of course, being tied as it is not only to a militia but to a "well-regulated" one, it shouldn't be as problematic as it is. I am quite certain the amendment was never meant to be a suicide pact.

While the U.S. Constitution is in many ways a remarkable document, it is not flawless and it is not divinely inspired. It's important not to lose sight of what its framers aspired to:

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

Yes, "defence," when used as a noun, is spelled with a "c." The framers made no claim to have established a perfect union, a utopia. Counting each enslaved black person as three-fifths of a person ought to lay to rest any claims of establishing a perfect union or channeling divine revelation. The same could be said for severely restricting the voting franchise, etc.

So, to my fellow citizens, as inheritors of this constitutional order it is up to us to further perfect our union. The good news is this is something we have done throughout our history. It's true, the on-going project of perfecting our union has happened something like a one and-a-half step forward, one step back manner. Given my unbelief in human perfectibility, this is an assymptotal endeavor at best. What I find distressing is that in the current moment it seems like we're not only taking two or three steps backwards but that we've turned and started running in the opposite direction.