Here are a couple of things that trouble me.
1)
Americans rejecting American exceptionalism NOW because the Framers didn't purge all injustice from society at our Founding THEN.
The injustice most mentioned from this group is, of course, slavery. The attitude is not only should we really
not hold the Framers in high regard, but because they tolerated slavery and did not obliterate it, we should also not hold the form of government and Constitution they gave us in high regard. I even hear people on this board buying into this line of thinking.
My answer to this pompous attitude is that our Framers never claimed our system would destroy injustice overnight. But within the Constitution they gave us were the tools to lift our citizens to a higher plane over a period of time. Even with slavery in our midst we started out miles ahead of most ancient countries when it came to the rights of individuals. even in some countries that abolished slavery before we did were not found the liberties for the common man that were found in America at it's birth.
This is why I am troubled when people here on this board actually correct me for pointing out the problems we face because we've strayed from our Founders' principles by telling me things like, "
Yeah, but don't forget they were slave owners!" Frederick Douglas once held our founders in contempt, but later had a radical shift in his thinking concerning these noble men. His change in thinking is documented by writer Peter C. Myers.....
Quote:
Douglass publicly announced his change of opinion in the spring of 1851, but his most powerful statement of his revised view appears, fittingly enough, in his speech at an Independence Day celebration in 1852. In that speech, often considered the greatest of all abolitionist speeches, he excoriated America’s injustices no less vigorously than he ever had, but he took great care to distinguish America’s practice from its first principles and the actions of its subsequent generations from those of its Founders.
“The signers of the Declaration of Independence,” Douglass told his audience that day, “were brave men. They were great men too…. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes.” In his discerning view, however, the main source of their greatness—the virtue that enabled them to be more than revolutionaries, the Founders of a great republic—inhered not in their bravery but in their dedication to the “eternal principles,” the “saving principles,” set forth in the unique revolutionary document they dared to sign. “Your fathers, the fathers of this republic, did, most deliberately…and with a sublime faith in the great principles of justice and freedom, lay deep the corner-stone of the national superstructure, which has risen and still rises in grandeur around you…. Mark them!”
In truth, Douglass had long admired the Declaration and the Revolution; but now, having broken with the Garrisonian variant of abolitionism, he had come to admire the whole of the Founding, because he had come to judge the Constitution to be faithful to the saving principles of the Declaration. The charge of a pro-slavery Constitution was “a slander upon [the] memory” of the Framers, he contended; “interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document.” Consider “the constitution according to its plain reading,” Douglass continued, “and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.”
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Sadly some on AFF do not seem to hold the constitution and our Founders in the same high regard that Douglas did.
2) Our youth thinking totalitarian countries and America are on an equal moral footing.
Just today a young man at the High School where I work part time told me, "
If I could live anywhere I'd live in Cuba" After I finished barfing I began to question him as to why he would want to live in a country which offers absolutely no freedom to its citizens but only repression. He replied, "
I know people who live there and they are very happy." I responded, "
If people there are so happy then why are they still risking their lives to leave there in flimsy rafts to come here? Why aren't people leaving here to get to Cuba?" I wonder if he will go ask these questions to those influencing him on the wonderful virtues of life in Cuba.
Thank you for your kind attention.
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