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PSW's avatar

Well said, Ms Libes. I'm guessing almost all groups/ethnicities have been the target of oppression at one time or another throughout history. My mother's grandparents were native Irish victims of the Potato Famine and before that the British oppression of the Irish Catholics. They came here in the mid-late 1800s and established several small businesses in the Chicago area and later Alleghan Michigan. All 10 of their sons enlisted in the Armed Services during WWI.

What is important is that these groups, like those of your parents and those from other oppressive regimes or cultures overcame that in this country and did not wallow in their victimhood. Teaching our young people that there is anywhere near the level of oppression here that exists in many other countries is absurd.

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James Quinn's avatar

I’m an old White Guy, someone who once would have been referred to as a WASP (don’t know if that’s still a concept), so I guess in a way I’m at another end of the spectrum Ms. Libes describes. My family has been in private education (both ElHi and collegiate) for half the time we’ve been a country; my paternal grandfather started teaching math at UPenn in 1894 and ending up Chair of the English Department and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. We also number among us three Independent school heads, one church preschool director, one college drama department head, and me (retired independent elementary school history teacher and division head) along with a fair assortment of lawyers, ministers, doctors, bankers and the like along the way.

I mention all that because I am proud of all of us, justifiably I believe, but more because of the sense of our history that we imbibed ‘along with our mothers’ milk’ due to the sheer love and appreciation of it in the hearts and minds of three plus generations of Americans (most of the family came over as a result of the Irish potato famine).

At the same time, teachers’ salaries being what they were when I was growing up, there were eight of us, so we lived with relatively tight belts, although I was certainly not unconscious of the wealth of many of my classmates at the independent school at which Dad taught and was later head (the only way he could have afforded my tuition even in that distant day).

Certainly when I was growing up in the aftermath of WWII (I was born exactly five months to the day before the Enola Gay opened up her bomb bay door over Hiroshima) there was a common feeling that we lived in a great country. The racial rumblings from the south which would become a roar before I was out of school were not clear to us along Philadelphia’s Main Line until I was well into high school, and the disaster of Vietnam was still only a vague dissonance from far away.

So I have lived through the apparent transformational period Ms Libes describes. I am certainly fully aware of reasons why Americans might now think us less than whatever promise we may once have believed. But that lack of appreciation is hardly new. You would have heard much the same kind of talk during the Great Depression, alongside the rise of populism during the Gilded Age and the time of the so-called Robber Barons, during the Civil War and the last two decades which preceded it, and intermingled with the election of Andrew Jackson. Indeed, one might have heard something like it during the presidential campaign of 1800, still one of the nastiest in our history.

We are a grand and exceptionally risky experiment, the first of its kind; perhaps the most extraordinary experiment in human government ever attempted. And we haven’t been at it for very long. I could have talked to a man who fought in the Civil War. A man who fought in that war could have talked to a man who fought in the Revolution and was present at the Founding. We are that young. We tend to forget that.

To me, and I’m sure it is the result of having taught our history for over 40 years, the problem is that we keep thinking that wherever we are now is some sort of finished product, etched in stone for all time. Despite all the rants about it, we don’t seem to have achieved American exceptionalism. What we forget in thinking that way is that our exceptionalism is not a given, but rather a promise bequeathed to us by a group of flawed but hopeful men in a hot closed room in a world very different from ours. We are not now, nor can we ever be a finished product. Alone among all the governing methods we’ve tried since ‘the kingship descended from Heaven in ancient Sumer, democracy doesn’t work that way. It is always open ended. We can always improve it if we believe we can. But to do so, we have to understand far better than I fear most of us do what we were designed to be - that nation in which We the People could together find enough of the courage, the honesty, the understanding, the tolerance, the humility, the compassion, the wisdom, the humor, the hope, and the sheer common sense to govern ourselves from the bottom up. That is the promise we inherited, and we need to measure our progress by the amount of those traits in our public discourse. It is, in the end, as Lincoln understood, up to us.

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