Jul 4, 2020

Abominable Ignorance of the Citizenry Is the Greatest National Crisis on Fourth of July 2020

On this strange and challenging Fourth of July I sit for a moment in the splendid site in the universe that is my study, remembering one of the first passages upon which I exercised my lifelong propensity for memorization of inspiring and eloquent written expression  >>>>>


 

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When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth that separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

 

We hold these truths to be self-evident:  That all men are created equal;  that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;  that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

 

That to secure these liberties, governments are instituted by men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed;  that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive until these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness…..

 

Thirteen years later, the form for “organizing its powers” to which Thomas Jefferson referred in that brilliant beginning (and in wordage nearly 25%) of the Declaration of Independence was strongly suggested in the Preamble penned by James Madison in his even more brilliant Constitution of the United States of America, also memorized and in this case referenced in the oration that I delivered in speech contests:

 

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the general welfare, and secure these blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of America

 

On this day in 2020, 144 years after the Declaration of Independence was promulgated, and 131 years after the Constitution, the power of those documents is strongly suggested by what I assert is very little need for change in the wording or the principles.  As a feminist, I would change “mankind” to humankind and “men” to people (and as another indication of the brilliance of the document, we could do so by amendment), and I would be fine with changing references to Divinity to Nature instead;  as a leftist, nothing else in the Declaration and nothing at all in the Preamble, would I change.

 

After his verbally rollicking beginning, Jefferson continues to rollick with a long list of abuses by King King George, a review of what the colonists had done to try to avoid the break, then to make the break with the declaration that “these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.”

 

Only at one place in the Declaration would Jefferson betray his own perfections and those of his times, that point at which among his verbal bombs launched at George he writes

 

He has excited domestic insurrection among us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known role of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions,

 

thus ironically presaging the approach that the nation would take for the “undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions” pertinent to the people assigned the epithet properly assigned to those who perpetrated the 1930 Indian Removal Act and the 1887 Dawes Act.   

 

Tom, for all of his brilliance, gave part of himself away on that one.

 

As to  Madison, his mostly brilliant luster dimmed most abjectly in excluding “Indians not taxed” and “three-fifths” of all other persons, those latter constituting that majority of African Americans who could not be counted part of the “whole number of free persons.”

 

Very complex and at times virulently flawed, these idealists who created the world’s most diverse prototype for contemporary democracy.

 

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These reflections lead me to assert that in the now quite un-United States of 4 July 2020 we are mired not in two but three national crises:

 

1      >>>>>>          the health threat posed by and national policy related to COVID-19

 

2      >>>>>>          issues raised by the murder of George Floyd

 

3      >>>>>>          woeful ignorance, vitiating responses to the two other crises

 

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History and historical personages are complex.

 

Whatever the truth about the immorality of the character, the war, and the lifestyle represented by  of the people formerly celebrated with statues, the foundations of those sculpted testimonies to human imperfection were surely sturdier than the knowledge base of most of those doing the

ripping---  and most of those not inclined to rip are at least as ignorant.

 

Very hard it is to have a national discussion about the events and people of history in the absence of one whit of knowledge about the events and people history.

 

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I wonder what will happen if the rippers and the erasers turn their attention to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

 

Methinks that there are few visual recognitions of James Madison to be ripped asunder;  and in perfect irony, Madison is at once the foremost architect of national democracy who ever breathed and mostly unknown as to his brilliance and accomplishment by the American public.  Those who named the capital of Wisconsin must have had some idea, but most of the current residents of the city most likely do not.  And most of the national citizenry could not even cite the capital of Wisconsin or its 49 companions across land and sea.

 

By contrast, there is quite a bit of visual testimony to Jefferson, and many a name.   

 

Given that the architects of the nation that would in time, on the basis of constitutional amendments and the capacity for legislative innovation, tend toward increasing democratization, were all proponents of slavery who launched a nation upon racist assumptions and a limited notion of “the people,”

 

what will we do with that? 

 

Does the citizenry even know enough to feel as it should a wrenching cognitive dissonance?

 

What will be ripped up and cast asunder?

 

More importantly, will such an ignorant citizenry as ours have any idea at all as to what to create in the absence of the values and the system implicitly or explicitly debased as the symbols are un-based?

 

I’ll watch with a certain agony as destruction exceeds capacity for construction.

 

But as a leftist activist for overhauled K-12 education, I am busy now and will be for many moons doing what I can to put ideas before a citizenry that I intend to make knowledgeable enough to understand as I do my own ripping asunder---   of the current ideological framework of the Minneapolis Public Schools. 

 

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