I am so grateful to be an American.
But, I wasn't always, and that was one of my big mistakes as a parent.
Sunday, January 28th, 2024
As many of you know, I’m recovering from surgery and sitting is difficult. So, this Substack will be fairly short. (LOL - turned out a lot longer than I expected.)
Tomorrow I get my stitches out! Yes, I am very grateful for my relatively good diagnosis (so far) and that my two minor surgeries are soon to be behind me. I am not thrilled with my medical bills (because my long time Dermatologist doesn’t accept my new medical insurance), but such is life. For now, I can’t wait to get back in the pool, on my bike, on the trails, and by this summer — I want to be back on the dance floor, too! Life is not to be wasted.
Mind you, these are the ruminations of a 51 year old woman. I mention this because age changes how we look at life and the world. Not for all of us. Some people change very little during their long lives. But, I believe most of us gain insights and perspective as we age, for a few reasons that I’ll talk about another day.
The point is, my views are shifting — both significantly and in some ways barely at all. I feel like I’m honing my views, adding the finer nuance of age and experience to core principles that remain constant. One thing that hasn’t changed in all my years?
My gratitude for the Constitution of the United States of America.
This image, BTW, has been manipulated. How do I know? You can read it!
I’ve taken my sons to Washington DC several times, and we’ve visited most of the museums (only a few each trip, so we didn’t rush ourselves). Today, the original copy of the Constitution is kept in the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. The room that displays these three pivotal documents is called the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom. About a decade ago, my sons and I visited the National Archives Museum. Assuming the document protected behind super thick, bullet proof glass or plexiglass (??) is the actual document from centuries ago — you can barely read it. It’s super faded (which makes sense), and it’s also super important! I felt a real sense of reverence and appreciation as I looked down upon the handwritten hopes, deeply considered goals, and carefully crafted social contract that is superior to all others ever created.
We are so lucky!
But, how often do we experience and cherish our luck? Not often enough, and for some of us — never. This is a mistake I made, while raising my boys. There are two sayings that relate to my experience, and we ought to keep them in mind:
“Familiarity breeds contempt…”
“The grass is always greener…”
Human beings make mistakes. Gather humans together, collate their energy into a society, develop power, seek influence, get involved in world affairs, and bad shit will happen. Every time. This, I now realize, is inevitable.
Is that distressing? No.
This is what age has gifted me. Wisdom, in the form of acceptance and patience. I’m not distressed because I’m coming to accept the reality of human failing and its repetitive nature. Our errors are inescapable. Guaranteed. Normal. The natural state of humanity.
When I was younger, I didn’t understand this. Especially growing up as I did in the “Sesame Street Generation.” During my childhood, we were leaving a particularly dark period of human failings and moving forward into some significantly brighter places. With the Great Depression, two world wars, Vietnam, Tuskeegee, and Nazi Death Camps behind us — we were riding high on the monumental successes of the Civil Rights Movement, Feminist Movement, and the Gay & Lesbian Movement. In other words, it felt like we were evolving out of a dark place and into a more enlightened society. That, my dear friends, is a trap.
Expectations will ruin your day, every time. As I adulted, and the environmental impacts of modern technological, industrialized activities continued to be felt around the world, I suffered a severe disappointment. How could we, after Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring,” be ruining the environment in new and terrible ways? Thanks to the internet, anyone and everyone wanting to drive home their point, had simply to take a bunch of photos and blast them across the internet, freaking people out with visuals that usually had very little context behind them. Of course, you can’t know what you don’t know, and so — as nubile internet surfers, we were easily overwhelmed and manipulated. And it went beyond environmental issues. The USA seemed to be the root of many serious problems around the world!
I fell victim to the narrative that “the USA is a terrible country, abusing its power, pillaging the world for resources, leaving environmental devastation and societal distress in its wake.” I began to despise my own country (an attitude my husband did and still does hold), and I am sad to say, I shared my frustration with my children. I even began to despise my own species, resulting in a story I shared with my children frequently. It goes something like this…
“If I ever found a bottle and out popped a Genie who offered me three wishes, I would start of with this one (before I could get tricked into wasting my wishes). Dear Genie, please go back in time to when there were only 10 million humans alive on Earth, and cap our population at that number. Babies can only be born to replace those who have died, so we will remain at a population level that is natural and balanced, allowing the rest of the natural world to exist almost entirely unmolested by our species. That would be my first wish.”
I understand why I felt that way, but I no longer do, and that shift in my perspective aligns with my full appreciation for the truly exceptional nature of our nation’s founding documents.
I no longer resent or feel ashamed of my country for two reasons.
The goal is not to create a utopia where the down side of human nature is eliminated. That is impossible.
And, much of the world is as bad, or worse, than the USA. That might be hard to believe, but it’s true.
So, where does that leave me?
Hopeless?
Not a chance!
I feel relieved.
We, as Americans, have what we need to turn this ship around…again and again and again. And that’s the point. Today’s terrifying censorship is a repeat of what happened during the McCarthy Era. Today’s government-coerced mass medical experiment on Americans is a repeat of Tuskegee. Today’s media circus and violently bigoted treatment of the “unvaccinated,” is a repeat of the yellow journalism that manipulated Americans into believing it was legitimate and justified to incarcerate Japanese Americans during WWII.
We repeat. But, we also have a Constitution that says, “None of that is okay.” And, as the courts get involved, as the lawyers sue, as the judicial system does its job, our HUGE mistakes are exposed and declared unconstitutional.
According to the U.S. Senate, “The Constitution has remained in force because its framers successfully separated and balanced governmental powers to safeguard the interests of majority rule and minority rights, of liberty and equality, and of the federal and state governments. More a concise statement of national principles than a detailed plan of governmental operation, the Constitution has evolved to meet the changing needs of a modern society profoundly different from the eighteenth-century world in which its creators lived. To date, the Constitution has been amended 27 times, most recently in 1992. The first ten amendments constitute the Bill of Rights.”
And so — I am intensely grateful for our constitution. I want Americans to love it as I do, to read it and cherish it and understand why it works so well — for us — in the end. This year, I’ll be refreshing my understanding of our founding documents and sharing here, what I learn and how lucky we all are, to be citizens of the USA.