Perpend:
The
universe banged into existence almost 14 billion years ago, expanding in those
processes that created the earth 10 billion years later. Simple cells took life comparatively
quickly, just under a billion years after the earth formed, but not until 500
million years ago did fish swim in the sea.
Amphibians crawled onto the earth about 360 million years ago, and
reptiles roamed some 60 million years after that; then about 200 million years ago mammals
moved across the surface of this planet.
Birds flew across the skies at about 150 millions years ago, and flowers
bloomed some 20 million years thereafter.
But not until 60 million years ago did the earth know primates, and the
Great Apes did not make their terrestrial entrance until another 40 million
years had transpired.
Not until 2.5 million years ago--- tens of millions of years after the
appearance of those Great Apes--- did
creatures of the genus homo appear,
and life ensued another million years before representatives of that genus
walked upright. Our more immediate
progenitors, of the genus homo and
the species sapiens, trod the
expanses of East Africa for the first time only about 200 thousand years
counting backward from this year of 2019.
So we are very young: Human beings have only been on the earth 0.000044%
(forty-four millionths of one percent) of the earth’s existence and only for
0.000014% (fourteen millions of one percent) of that expanse of time since the
Big Bang.
No wonder that we’ve made so many mistakes
in this trial and error of a process called life. We are, as the Lord Hamlet tells us, “a work
of art,” “noble in reason,” “infinite in faculty.” But we are still learning how to shape
ourselves into the works of art that will make us worthy as the “paragons of
the world,” to use our reason for creating conditions of peace, to call upon
our faculties to be all that in our enormous potential we can be.
Cruelty of humanity toward humanity has been the dominant impulse for that time that humankind has walked the earth. Early societies tended toward egalitarianism, but the caddish truculence in which the male of the species excels became the major mode of human interaction as those formations ironically called “civilization” emerged from 4,000 BCE: For millennia thereafter, success and the title “Great” meant ability to conquer and dominate. Athenians experimented with a very limited form of democracy, Romans evolved republican institutions of governance, Chinese developed bureaucratic position based on merit; but even in these governing configurations, only males from the propertied classes had the privilege of citizenship or had overwhelming advantages in gaining bureaucratic position.
Even as we drew nearer to modernity,
aristocrats dominated political systems.
China had its emperors, as did Japan, but in the latter emperors were
mostly symbolic screens behind which a military aristocracy produced shoguns
that had real power. In Europe,
aristocrats dominated the feudal Middle Ages (500-1500 CE) until the more
militarily and politically successful aristocrats emerged as monarchs and
assembled fiefdoms into nation-states:
Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands. In Great Britain, the idea of limited
monarchy gained materialization in the Glorious Revolution of 1687-1688, so
that from that time forward a propertied British elite served via parliament as
a legislative counter to monarchical power.
By the late 18th century, the
mercantile elite of Massachusetts in the thirteen colonies along the Atlantic
seaboard took umbrage at parliamentary laws that threatened their class
interests and incited other folk to rebellion.
By 1781 a slave-owning plantation magnate, George Washington, led the
colonial forces to victory and in 1789 became the first president of the United
States of America. In addition to Washington
among the first presidents, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe
also were slave owners; and the populist
president Andrew Jackson (terms spanned 1829-1837) expanded the electorate for
white males but was vicious in his pro-slavery and anti-American Indian
stances.
North and South tensions induced the Civil
War and a truncated effort to bring former slaves into free citizenship as
putatively delivered in the 13th, 14th, and 15th
Amendments to the United States Constitution came to an end with the Compromise
of 1877. Supreme Court justices fell to
new depths in their mostly morally corrupt history by ruling for segregation in
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Jim Crow and Black Code violations of the
best features of the United States Constitution, along with 4600 lynchings
between 1877 and 1965, motivated African Americans on their Great Northern
Migration from 1915, even during a deeply racist phase of United States history
in which Chinese, Japanese, Jews, eastern Europeans, and southern Europeans
faced severe discrimination and urban squalor.
Neither these groups nor white women (the
latter despite finally gaining the vote in 1920 via the 19th Amendment)
advanced prospects for full citizenship until congressional liberals awoke to
pass the Civil Rights Act (1964), Voting Rights Act (1965), equal economic
opportunity legislation, and fair housing laws during the 1960s and early
1970s.
Congressional liberals awoke slowly but
conservatives attempted to stay in their moral slumber through all of the
advances wrought by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal (1930s), seminal civil rights
legislation (1960s), and the women’s movement (l960s-1970s).
Conservatives by definition prefer society
as formed by the experience of past decades and centuries; they resist change for human betterment, as
witnessed by conservative opposition to abolitionism, improved labor
conditions, labor union formation, female suffrage, civil rights, women’s
movement, gun control, environmental legislation, and matters of gender
identity. Only when certain attitudes
regarding such matters as racial and gender equality become fixed in the ether
of public opinion do conservatives relent and grudgingly adjust their
professedly altered views.
As we approach Fourth of July celebrations
of 2019, then, readers of the Star
Tribune should be clear as to the logically errant and moral abomination
that is conservatism and the intellectual poverty and moral depravity of
proponents such as Stephen Young, Mitch Pearlstein, George Will, and opinion
page editor Doug Tice. These
commentators can always be counted on to reveal their class and gender biases
and their abject blindness to the facts of history. They revere a deeply flawed set of Founders
and the Constitution they produced, evidently unaware that the United States
was born as a beneficiary of Enlightenment thinking but impeded by the biases
of male patricians whose personal and professional habits contradicted the very
ideals the Founders advanced.
The United States has for most of its
history been an unwieldy amalgam of the police state overlain with the
trappings of democracy, much like South Africa from the 1950s forward in its
advancement of an apartheid system modeled on the Jim Crow South. Conservatives have energetically opposed all
social and political advances at those historical junctures when leftist
radicals shamed timid liberals into action for the common good.
Humanity, still in its infancy, will make
many mistakes in the years and decades to come.
But we cannot afford our currently colossal mistakes to endure for
centuries. For the needed advancements
in racial, gender, and environmental matters to proceed, radicals must become
more persistent and liberals must be ever more deeply shamed; conservatives, in their illogic and
immorality will be useless until dragged into the brightest light of the public
ether.
Thus the wish for every American this July
Fourth should be that we continue to seek the democracy that we imagine
ourselves to be, knowing that we must overcome conservative recalcitrance every
step along the way.
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