Of the People, By the People, For the People
That the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
We have all heard those words ... so many times they can feel pretty bland. And yet Lincoln’s simple statement was revolutionary at the time. In the United States he spoke to southern enslavers insisted that the government had but one role: to protect private property, which meant, of course, to do the bidding of white males ... or at least those of wealth and status.
And that tension—the tension between government that does the bidding of the “haves” and government that provides for the needs of ordinary citizens—is still unresolved. In my lifetime, Ronald Reagan’s “trickle-down economics” changed the direction of our entire society. “Trickle-down,” of course, proved to be a misnomer. Is there a nice catchphrase that can be applied to wealth spewing upward?
We like to think of ourselves as a shining beacon for the rest of the world, but that “beacon” shines too often through the barrel of a gun. Consider our 750 military bases scattered around the globe and our fingers in every war everywhere. In this information economy, we have the best higher-education system in the world, but that education leaves our graduates saddled with debt for decades. And while we claim to take pride in our multiculturalism, the vast majority of power still resides in the hands of straight, white males.
All of which barely touches on the ways our system fails to fulfill our own vision.
We live in a time of overwhelming change, change on every level imaginable, and no one, progressive or conservative, knows how to respond to such profound change. And because we don’t know, our government doesn’t know. And because we are all so deeply frightened by all of that not-knowing, every solution to every problem gets paraded before the world as a certainty. Certainties that divide us more emphatically every day.
And it is the division between us, “the people,” that concerns me even more deeply than the behavior of an administration I didn’t vote for and cannot respect. I see us standing on opposite sides of a chasm that grows wider by the day. We peer across the crevasse, making assumptions about who that other is over there, what they believe, how they hate ... why it is acceptable for us to hate, too.
That hate will destroy us, more certainly than anything our leaders can do to us.
I’m not naïve. There are very real differences between us. Certainly, differences in the solutions we seek. But I wonder. Do we really begin from such a different place? What would happen if we sat down and talked to one another? Honestly. With open hearts. What if we said to our neighbors, “I’m scared. Are you scared, too?”
And then what might happen if we listened?
Just listened.
Quietly.
Without defense.
Without even any attempt to convince those others of our own views.
Might we begin to heal wounds? Begin to find ways to work with rather than against one another?
Might we even discover that we aren’t such strangers, after all? That on both sides of the gaping divide, we all want pretty much the same thing?
Government of the people, by the people, for the people!
Let it not perish.
