The Land That Never Has Been Yet
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
January 12, 2020
“Let America be America again, the land that never has been yet.” (Langston Hughes, Let America be America Again)
Truly, it feels as though this is an extraordinarily difficult time to be an American. We are so divided. And we know from our history that there have been other such times, especially during the Civil War, when we were literally divided in two. But what is hard to see today is, how do we move forward together into the future, when we find that we can’t agree on some of the most basic facts of a given day, let alone larger truths?
There are many reasons why this era will be remembered as difficult: our inability to resolve issues of immigration and poverty, or the issues of abortion and gun violence; our unwillingness to look squarely and honestly at the climate crisis; our inability or unwillingness to extricate ourselves from the never-ending wars in the Middle East. These add up to almost insurmountable challenges.
Something underlies each one of these issues, however, that I fear more than anything else: and that is our seeming inability to agree on what is true. To agree on facts. Looking at the most recent example: why did the United States choose to assassinate an Iranian general? Was there an imminent threat to American safety? Well, it depends on who you are listening to.
Cornel West, the author and speaker, states that today we live in an era of mendacity. An era, in other words, of untruthfulness, a time when lies are ubiquitous. (Cornel West, Ware Lecture, UUA General Assembly, June 28, 2015.)
We know this, of course. We see it every day, hear it in the efforts of the media to fact-check public claims from politicians, watch in dismay as whole segments of the population grab onto ‘alternative facts’.
We are spending the month of January on an inquiry into Integrity. Last week we talked about what integrity means for us as individuals. We heard that living lives of integrity means that we are not living divided lives; that we find the courage to acknowledge and to embrace our full selves and to allow others to see us as we are, so that, as I put it, our insides match our outsides.
The question becomes, does the United States maintain its integrity? Do our actions match our words? Do the lives we lead and the beliefs we share, and all the comments we make on social media match the fundamental values that our founders set forth at the beginning of our history?
Well, of course not. And so, in thinking about our current era of mendacity, of untruthfulness, I went back to the beginning, to the famous phrase in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
It was a tall order, making such a statement back in 1776. And of course, the purpose was to argue the case for separation from England, and why the white colonists in North America should have the right to self-government. But of course, as history unfolded, this declaration became our foundational national document, with the lofty ideals and words enshrined forever.
“The land,” as poet Langston Hughes wrote in 1935, in the depths of the Depression, “The land that never has been yet.”
And here, in 2020, the land that is still not.
The question becomes, what happens to a country when it is founded on ideals intended for a particular time and place, and for particular people, ideals that it struggles to achieve? The United States was founded on a lie. We try to soften that fact, try to point to progress, which we do achieve, try to cast the words as aspirational. But in fact, the words were not true for most people living in what ultimately became the United States back in 1776, and they are still not true for too many of us today.
My friends, I want to pause here and acknowledge that this is a hard conversation to have. Our Founders may have held our truths to be self-evident, but the reality for us today is that we must hold these truths to be very uncomfortable.
And so today we are forced to ask ourselves, do we have national integrity? On what is it based?
Our founding ideals were intended for a small group of colonists. What the Founders could not have foreseen was that the group of colonies that they wrote about began to change almost immediately.
“Between 1500 and 1800, roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried 12 million Africans there by force; and as many as 50 million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease. … Taking possession of the Americas gave Europeans a surplus of land; it ended famine and led to four centuries of economic growth.” (Jill Lepore, These Truths, quoted in New York Times Book Review, Andrew Sullivan, September 14, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/books/review/jill-lepore-these-truths.html)
In short, there was an unprecedented movement of people from other continents and a great loss of the native people. The America the Founders envisioned evolved quickly and continuously throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The founding documents might have set forth universal truths, but they were not adequate to hold the realities of rapid growth and change. Since the very beginning we have considered freedom – liberty – as the ideal value, but we were unable to accept that everyone coming to these shores was equally entitled to that freedom. And so was established a national principle that was not extended to everyone.
We have been left with a national history and culture full of contradictions. We valued freedom, and slavery. We valued free speech, but not for everyone. We celebrated democracy, but originally only white men who owned land could vote. The Electoral College was designed to blunt the impact of the popular vote. This great divide, this lack of integrity, lack of wholeness, began with the very founding of the country, and has prevented us from truly living into our full potential. As we read a few moments ago, President Abraham Lincoln said, “Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and cannot long retain it.” It’s possible that many have retained their freedom, but have lost their integrity, and their honesty. We have all been diminished by this fundamental untruth lying at the base of our identity.
This inability to resolve the ideal of liberty for everyone plagues the United States to this day. Far too many see their own freedom as absolute, but the freedom of others as limited. Far too many believe they can tell others where they can live, or who they can love. Far too many think they have the right to prevent others from voting. Or that their right to own guns is more important than the safety of others.
Perhaps most concerning of all, here in the new year 2020, is the belief in unbridled capitalism; the belief in the freedom to gain wealth with no limits; regardless of the impact on peoples’ lives, the impact on health, the impact on the other creatures who cannot benefit, and the impact on the planet itself. Freedom was never intended to be an absolute, but far too many Americans treat it as such, for themselves, at least. Not for everyone.
Ultimately, the ideal of freedom became paramount, and the ideal of equality became less important. This created the great divide; can you have total freedom, and equality? And so we are faced with this divide, this lack of integrity, the lie at the foundation of our national life.
How might we knit the country together, bridge this divide, and make ourselves truly whole for the first time?
Cornel West calls us to courage. He says that integrity will arise from “the quality of our courage and from our willingness to bear witness radically against the grain even if we have to sacrifice something.” (Ware Lecture, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iAHrgirE7I)
What would we have to sacrifice? For starters, we would let go of some of our most cherished narratives: what we think of as our national truths. We would have to face squarely the fact that many of us do not have equal treatment, or equal rights, and that therefore we cannot be completely free. European Americans would have to sacrifice power, and the assumption that our voices are at the center, that we will be heard and that our narratives will be the ones that prevail. We would sacrifice political and governmental power. Those who insist on owning any gun they want would have to relinquish some of those rights. And we all must learn to sacrifice some of our way of life in order to help our planet to heal; sacrifice some of the products we take for granted, some of the conveniences we enjoy; driving big cars, heating and cooling our homes and offices for maximum comfort.
Actions such as this require courage. But beyond courage, changes to our stories and our beliefs, and to our way of life, require compassion and love.
Last March 15, there were two horrific shootings in mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. 72 hours later, amidst the outpouring of horror and grief, the New Zealand Prime Minister and her cabinet announced plans to reform gun laws in the country, and within days the Parliament had voted to ban military-style weapons, as well as high capacity magazines for ammunition. Now, granted, in New Zealand gun ownership is considered to be a privilege, not a right, as it is under the U.S. Constitution. But the overwhelming and swift response arose out of a place of compassion, and an almost universal conviction that the lives and safety of people were more important than the privilege of gun ownership.
The United States cannot muster that kind of clarity, or the will to act decisively. Why is that?
Too often in the United States we have held our freedom as more important than anything else; more important than equality, certainly, but also more important than the quality of life for all our residents. We can forget that government can and should prioritize the care and support of its citizens over the protection of our freedoms. To truly care for its citizens, a country has to lead from a place of compassion, and love, and a sense of the equal humanity of all people. Too often we have failed to govern from that place of compassion.
My friends, we have never truly achieved the lofty ideals of our Founders, particularly the belief that all people are created equal. Over the generations we have perpetuated this myth despite all the evidence of people who have suffered oppression, who have been treated as ‘less than’, as other. This month as we have studied integrity, we have learned that we are not whole, but rather, we live a divided national life. And the story we tell ourselves is not a totally true story, and so there is a lie at the very foundation of our national life. We look at ourselves today, with the lying, the alternative facts, and we can understand better where this comes from.
If we understand that God is Love, then we must grow in love and compassion in order to truly live into our pledge of being one nation, under such a God. In too many ways today, we are not one nation, whole and integral, and we are not doing the work of Love in the world.
“We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!” (Hughes, Let America Be America Again)
Blessed Be,
Amen.
