AMERICAN DREAM — 2023: THE GOLDEN RULE

THE American Dream remains the same:

Be Somebody.

Be someone you’re proud of.

If you’ve been the good example bringing someone back from the edge, keep it up.

If you’re the reason someone was out there, keep reading.

Whether it’s your words, or time spent listening, it’s always worth it.

Results do vary, but it’s the care you show that matters. It has that ‘Golden Rule’ feel?

This knowledge comes from stories where someone gets treated as they treat others, good stories.

Personal experience? Not so much.

But still, it’s America. Anything can happen.

As a writer with hope for the American Dream of equality, I’ve learned another in an endless line of uncomfortable truths.

A Stanford man named Jack says the phrase “All men are created equal” doesn’t mean what we thought it meant.

Things are not as they seem? Uh oh.

If you think you know jack-squat, this is Jack:

Rakove is the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and professor of political science, emeritus, in the School of Humanities and Sciences. His book, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (1996), won the Pulitzer Prize in History. His new book, Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience: The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion will be published next month.

Yeah, he sounds like a big deal to me, too.

So let’s start with the idea that Jack knows more than us.

Jack Says:

He says a lot and backs it up.

It’s your job, our job, to accept his knowledge as true history, historical reality.

Dare I say, FACT?

I’m a history major from a fourth rate public school out west with a lifetime grudge against, and envy of, easties who come out thinking they’re smarter than everyone else.

Jack Rakove is an exception. Besides, he’s been a Stanford teacher, not some random blogger chasing clicks.

If he’s not the first scholar to disconnect ‘All men are created equal’ from the individual man, it’s the first I’ve heard it, and it makes sense in a satisfying way.

You’ve got to hand it to a writer who makes the Declaration of Independence more relevant.

On July 4, 1776, when the Continental Congress adopted the historic text drafted by Thomas Jefferson, they did not intend it to mean individual equality. Rather, what they declared was that American colonists, as a people, had the same rights to self-government as other nations. Because they possessed this fundamental right, Rakove said, they could establish new governments within each of the states and collectively assume their “separate and equal station” with other nations. It was only in the decades after the American Revolutionary War that the phrase acquired its compelling reputation as a statement of individual equality.

I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit wondering why I haven’t done more with the advantages outlined in the Declaration.

Now I know it wasn’t all about me after all, but the community of nations. Whew.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address In New Light

Lincoln spoke after the God-awful Battle of Gettysburg.

The Battle of Gettysburg remains the deadliest battle of the Civil War. As many as 23,000 Yankees and 28,000 Confederates were killed, wounded, or captured over the course of just three days.

Not all men were created equally dead or wounded or captured, just those caught in the meat grinder of war in the 1860’s.

Was Lincoln speaking of America as an equal among nations at Gettysburg, or delivering a recruiting pitch to families in the North?

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. 

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

The part that gives me trouble is the number of dead. As a former Army private, I know my fate in battles with large losses.

“Get out there, private.”

“Yes, SIR.”

To compound the grief of Gettysburg, there’s a certain disrespect from a safe distance.

On June 1, 1865, Senator Charles Sumner referred to the most famous speech ever given by President Abraham Lincoln. In his eulogy on the slain president, he called the Gettysburg Address a “monumental act.” He said Lincoln was mistaken that “the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.” Rather, the Bostonian remarked, “The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech.”

Dear Mr. Sumner,

The battle is more important to the American Dream, the promise lost to each soldier.

The Battle For The American Dream

The battle for equality runs from the Civil War in 1863, to Civil Rights in 1963, to now what?

Be somebody, someone you’re proud of.

This is the Golden Rule part.

The first thing that people can do to improve things around them is to make sure that we live up to the promise of opportunity in our own lives. That means treating each other fairly and trying to examine our own biases. 

The second thing is to be part of making our society more equal. 

The Implicit Association Test on race is an online test that you can take on Harvard University’s Web site. It’s a fascinating way to see biases you might unknowingly have. 

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What I knowingly have is the ability of all bloggers, the ability to amplify a message on a world wide platform.

I’ve got recent readers scrolling BoomerPdx from South Africa.

What I want them to know is the words they read from this writer are the same words I use in my married life of thirty-six years, the same words used to raise two boys to become men who I’m more proud of than I could have imagined from the start.

Too often we learn about personal lives and come away disappointed.

My wife and kids may be disappointed in me, but it’s not from mistreatment.

I am a writer filling readers with hope, the same hope in an American Dream explained fifty years ago.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice.

So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

Equality for all under the Golden Rule sounds like a plan?

“In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you.”

Pass it along. Tell them Martin Luther King, Jr. sent you.