I made it to the White House and the United States Capitol for the first time earlier this year. I was traveling with my family for a long weekend to Washington, D.C. I must admit that I was pretty taken with the imagery and architecture of the seat of our republic.
I had been to the city once before, but not to those two buildings. I had seen and entered all of the memorials on the National Mall and stood in awe of the American Ebenezers to Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King, all under the watch of the Washington Monument, of course, and the reminder of what kind of men built this country -- and the missteps along the way to get here.
It was the right time for me, though, because I was consuming a lot of media about history, in particular the American and French Revolutions. When considering the historical context of what political theory was like in Europe in the 18th Century, the United States of America is a gigantic human leap forward. The mission statement captured in the Declaration of Independence set a goal for us all to strive for -- that all of us are equal and made that way by powers greater than any earthly institutions and any governments that interfere with those rights are illegitimate. It was, of course, also fraught with internal contradictions. Just like all of us still are.
Without that historical context, it is easy to overlook how significant the articulation of these ideas were. The American Revolution was revolutionary in many senses of the word, since the major powers on the European Continent were still ruled by monarchs invested by divine right (and so were those across the world in Asia, for that matter). The failures of the French Revolution that looked to ours and reached out for the same liberty we now enjoyed showed how fragile those ideas are and how lucky we were to have the men named on the Mall. The expression "the Revolution eats its children" comes from this period in France. The sins of America were different ones than the French, but our guiding principles at least identified a North Star for us (and those for whom the promise of the Declaration was cruelly and immorally excluded) to sail towards. There was no Reign of Terror to devour our own. At least, not in the same way. Our Reign of Terror was an issue of our ideals not being shared with all of our sons and daughters; France's was about which ideals should actually count.
There are two places on the National Mall that made me cry both times: the Lincoln Memorial and the Vietnam War Memorial. The Lincoln Memorial stands as a testament that this project, imperfect in execution as it was, is worth preserving, at the expense of blood. Engraved inside the classical temple are Lincoln's two greatest speeches -- among anyone's greatest speeches -- defending the virtue of republican self-government and advocating magnanimity to the enemy, our own countrymen, at the conclusion of the bloody surgery of exorcising part of America's fallen nature. The moral stain of slavery was not completely cleansed after the conclusion of the Civil War, but the sails of the ship of state tacked closer to Jefferson's North Star.
The Vietnam Memorial is different. While the Lincoln Memorial is theoretical and high minded, the Vietnam War Memorial is clinical in its groundedness. It is a relentless reminder of just what war costs as after each step the names just keep coming, the wall getting taller, and deeper. It is taller than you are before you reach the halfway point. It also serves the aching realization that there is no Second Inaugural Address, no end of slavery, no clear hard won prize purchased with the dearly spent lives. It is a reminder that "progress" does not necessarily trend in a one to one ratio with the axis of time, as much as our optimism (and etchings on our hero's monuments) wants it to, without effort. The arc of the moral universe is long, but there is no gravitational center without principled people bending it.
At the same time our states were warring against themselves, France had slipped into a Second -- Second -- Empire; their republican ideals did not stick. Let us not forget this Fourth of July what we have been bequeathed by our forefathers. It includes all of us, of every ethnicity, creed, and sex. All men, endowed by our Creator. It is our birthright. Those values are worth preserving. They are worth advancing. They are rare. And they are easy to lose.
