American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery

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One day in the late spring of 1630, on the deck of a three-masted, 350-ton ship somewhere in the North Atlantic, John Winthrop set forth his vision for the community he and his Puritan congregation would build in New England. “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” he told his 300 fellow passengers toward the end of his long sermon. “The eyes of all people are upon us.” And so, even before the Arbella had anchored off what would become Boston, Massachusetts, and 146 years before independence had been declared, American Exceptionalism was born.

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Thank You

I wrote my first Perspectives (“Haiti”) on January 2, 2012. Initially, the blogs were limited to 250 words and were published five (and sometimes six) times a week. Their intent was to present a modest thought, one that connected my personal world to the much larger world beyond, in the hope of stimulating us (you and me) to think a little differently – to consider something from a new perspective.

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The Great Newtonian-Einsteinian Gravity Conspiracy

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The reason I mention this at all is that one of the historical consequences of the Newtonian-Einsteinian gravity conspiracy has been to consign to the dustbin of history the equally important – and now lamentably forgotten – counterforce of levity. I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but it certainly has been effective – and I see its impact every morning when I find my inbox filled with messages from candidates, PACs, and untold others in the political business, each one angrier, gloomier, at once more desperate and more negative than the last. To say there is no levity here, no humor, and not a hint of whimsy to start my day would be a huge understatement.

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“A republic if you can keep it.”*

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An unprecedented callousness has crept into our public discourse, and in the land of me first, the other no longer seems to matter. Bullies are not to be confronted but emulated. Lies are not to be exposed but repeated until they have become indistinguishable from the truth. And only a sucker says I’m sorry.

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Confronting the Past and Building the Future in Montgomery, Alabama

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My daughter, Annie, and I just spent two days in Montgomery at the opening of the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum:  From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which covers a small hilltop above Alabama’s capital city. It is an extraordinarily uplifting name for what is, in fact, a heartrending tribute to the more than 4,000 African American victims of lynching in America.  

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The antidote to bombast: politicians who will listen

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As I wrote last time, the Knight Foundation recently reported the lowest levels of trust in our government since Gallup began tracking the issue sixty years ago. In 1964, for example, 74 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do what is right at least most of the time. Today that figure is less than 25 percent. 

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