What We Can Do

Though you'll notice that I burst into humor from time to time when discussing the achingly muddled misjudgments and blatantly antagonistic international misadventures our country has been forced to endure due to misguided leadership, it's mostly to enjoy irony or to make light of the foolhardiness of the prime actors in these affairs, who could and should do so much better. I do not, however, take lightly the fearsome consequences that come from such missteps. These outright violations of common and human law and ethics can haunt us as a country for years.

There is reason for hope, and there are things we can do to not only improve our country's lot but also to turn the whole truck of state around and get it pointed back in the right direction. Why can we know that? Because we've been here before, and we have turned around.

We have as a people triumphed over our own foibles and moral shortcomings. We did turn away in the '50s and '60s from nearly a century of the worst kind of racial injustice and hatred. We did succeed in granting a large measure of civil rights to our African-American citizens who had been frozen out by decades of violence and Jim Crowism. Although the strength and surety of those rights continue to ebb and flow, we've mostly moved beyond the 400 years of slavery that stained our republic's reputation as a country holding a beacon of liberty up to the rest of the world.

We also in the '60s and '70s experienced a cultural revolution that swept away many social obstacles inhibiting academic freedom, artistic expression, sexual identity and many other societal impediments, including gender equality and ageism.

Over the last 25 years we've witnessed a back and forth, a progression and regression, among the various rights we worked to secure. Many of us have lost heart in recent years that the country has slipped back toward a more dangerous and repressive time.

The country indeed has regressed, but that doesn't mean that citizens of goodwill can't reclaim the higher moral ground

that rejects torture outright without caveat;

that yearns to be more inclusive and not less;

that understands that an advanced society can successfully combine material security with spiritual reflection, religious expression in harmony with secular safeguards;

that can encourage moderate and even progressive social values in conjunction with fiscal responsibility that does not abandon the neediest of our citizens but instead reaches out to support them and rally them to join the productive and healthy;

that reaches to create a civil, compassionate society in which a multitude of voices can coexist and be heard by all.

Okay, it's a little ambitious, and a one-size-fits-all agenda likely can't exist, but we can do better as a society only when we work together. For any one side to triumph in education, commerce, politics and religion by employing strategies of devision can, in the end, only pull us apart.

We know because we've all watched it.

We can move forward, make progress and set a higher standard. The past has shown us that we're up to it.