On America, 2016.
I begin writing on June 15, 2016, approximately ninety-six hours after the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, where the victims have been primarily LGBT people, and I’m angry. I am of course angry at the senseless death of my people. But I am also angry that politicians are circling, like sharks in the water, like ghouls, lurking in the shadows, are ready to capitalize on another tragedy. Politicians, for which I have no power over whatsoever, are about to pass bipartisan legislation that will seek to further limit my Constitutionally protected rights. A tragedy occurred, and politicians are about to expand surveillance and curtail my rights. I am angry because I am part of the LGBT community, and this is being done in my name.
Today is July 4, 2016. Two hundred and forty years after the Declaration of Independence. So I am spurred to write this address to you on this special occasion. July 4 should be a cause for celebration: we should celebrate and be thankful for what makes America special. But the tide seems to pull away from where the American project once began. Police brutality, stop and frisk, civil asset forfeiture, Guantánamo bay, gun laws, Ferguson, torture…how did we get here? Where are we going?
American exceptionalism
The primaries have effectively ended. Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee, and “Make America Great Again!” is his slogan, repeated over and over, a catchphrase, snowcloned into the collective consciousness. Many a journalist dollar has been earned writing about whether America was great, what does American greatness mean, was America ever great, and so on.
The term “American exceptionalism” is already an established concept, discussed long before Trump’s balding pate made its way on to all of our televisions. American exceptionalism — as defined by Wikipedia — consists of three concepts: America is inherently different; America is superior; and that America has a transformative mission to export its values to the world.
I do not intend to claim that America is superior, nor do I intend to claim that America has a duty to change the world. But I do claim that America is different. America is special. The United States was founded under unique conditions. The nature of the United States’s founding documents are special. For what reasons?
The legal protections afforded by the United States’s Constitution encode the adage of the boxes of liberty, often discussed as soapbox, ammo box, jury box, ballot box. Many nations protect access to the some of these boxes, but few nations’ constitutions protect access to the ammo box. The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution — regardless of your opinion on its interpretation — is unquestionably special. Only three countries in the world protect the right to keep and bear arms as a constitutional right. The Constitution, being the product of a revolution, and a companion to the Declaration of Independence, was written as a response to tyranny. Its goals were an explicit attempt to create a new nation, with the explicit goal of preventing tyranny rearing its head again.
These are legal documents that circumscribe the borders of action for a state. But appeals to legalism are far from compelling. Laws can be changed; the Constitution explicitly permits its amendment. Why, in the American psyche, is invocation of the Constitution such a powerful rhetorical thrust? The Constitution is far from a dry, legal document — it is not written in dense legalese; it is immediately accessible, despite some archaic language; it is immediately understandable. I posit that the articles of the Bill of Rights go further than a plentiful ground for lawyers and generals to play word games with, but in fact describe shared values amongst all Americans.
America is special because it recognizes the limit of government; its founding documents are explicitly constructed with the goal of setting itself against tyranny, against abuses of power. Whether this is inherently possible is a subject for another day, and there is good argument to suggest that it is not, for the United States’s current condition provides an unfortunately ready counterargument. Nevertheless, I suggest that the Constitution is not just a legal document which describes what the state can and cannot do, but has a moral dimension as well. The Bill of Rights forms American values, and it is those values and the climate in which they were formed that makes America special — what makes America great — so discussions around particular matters such as limiting speech, or the permissibility of torture, carry far more weight.
Change
Perhaps we started down this path on September 12, 2001, when some of us started to say that they’d rather be safe than free, and some of us looked upon the PATRIOT Act and its ilk as necessary evils. In great national unity, there was a desire for safety, for such an attack to never happen again.
America will never be completely safe. Yet national security is the omnipresent sell made by politicians towards the American people. National security has become the north star of our political discourse. When something happens, something must be done. We must pass a law, or increase surveillance, or restrict a right. All because the bad guys profit from our liberty.
But it is our liberty that makes America great: not our economy, not our military, not anything else. So to preserve it, sometimes nothing must be done. Inaction may be the better path, as difficult as it may be, as hard as it is to suppress the human instinct to make a situation right: inaction is just as valid as action. Doing nothing changes nothing. When we allow politicians to eat away at our rights — and if you agree that our rights describe our American values — we let politicians eat away at ourselves. Making laws is, for all practical purposes, permanent. No president since 2001 has eradicated any of the national security apparatus instituted after 2001. Terrorists can end lives, sow fear. But it is we who decide to give up our freedom.
I am sure there will be some who will look at me equating the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as some subset of shared human values and say that they certainly do not share the same enthusiasm for the 2nd Amendment as I might. Or some may truly wish to be more safe than free. Some throw around insinuations about changing our Constitution. If the Constitution represents our shared American values, then changing the Constitution represents fundamentally a change in who we are as a people.
Action isn’t free. What people have done in the past remains in our history forever. What people do today, or in the future, will be remembered. The land indelibly retains all that once happened there. Frederick Douglass inimitably describes this:
In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky — her grand old woods — her fertile fields — her beautiful rivers — her mighty lakes, and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked, my joy is soon turned to mourning. When I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit of slaveholding, robbery and wrong, — when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing, and led to reproach myself that any thing could fall from my lips in praise of such a land. America will not allow her children to love her.
The Civil War — for all its six hundred thousand dead, for all the blood that was shed, for all its complexity, its indelible marks on reunification in the South, on the growing rift between the Two Americas in our society — decisively settled the question regarding slavery in America and served to abolish it. It was encoded into the Constitution as our thirteenth amendment: our shared value that slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within America. Let us always be mindful of the cost.
Two Americas
People are divided as ever before. Division is unfortunately a deep-wired part of human behavior. It is something that we cannot trivially disassociate with; we divide over sports teams, we divide between state lines, we divide over national borders, we divide between political teams. Division is not a terrible thing. It spurs competition, and competition makes us achieve greater goals.
What is America truly about? If we are to consult the American people, then we would find that American society embodies this human quirk also. But it is the deep-rooted political divisions that many have noted which I want to focus on. It perhaps started long ago between the tensions between the North and South, and evolved from there: one America, socially tolerant, gregariously interested in the benefits that government can afford to people, federalist; the other, socially conservative — sometimes conservative in the extreme, gregariously interested in the benefits that government can afford to business, anti-federalist.
Nominally these Americas are tied with contemporary US political parties, the Democratic Party, as represented by the former, and the Republican Party, as represented by the latter. If, as I claim, Constitutional protections as outlined in the Bill of Rights describe pan-American values and not merely just law, then can either of these parties — can either of these Americas — claim hold on representing what America should be about? Neither of these political parties can truly hold itself to the American vision. The Democratic party; liberal America; consistently pushes an agenda against the second, fourth, and ninth amendments. Conservative America; the Republicans; pushes an agenda against the first, eighth, and fourteenth amendments.
Division is not a bad thing. But contemporary American society divides over destructive forces. We divide over which political team is more aggressive in depriving us of our rights in the name of safety. We divide over which political team is more intent on controlling what we do with our bodies. We divide over borders. We divide over love. We are divided over the wrong things. In being divided over the wrong things, the two political teams become one, and the question whether our rights are preserved becomes settled against our favor. In being divided over the wrong things, between Democrat and Republican, we lose sight of America, which lies outside of party bounds.
The future
On this July 4, the political reality in the United States leans towards a world where the nearly universally reviled Trump and Clinton are the standard-bearers for America. The anxiety gnaws deep in my bones: to what extent will we further tolerate our rights being eaten away into nothingness? I do not know.
There will be discussion about changing fundamentally who we are. But humanity has still not learned to tolerate disagreement and physically live adjacent to one another. How can those among us who want to dismantle these fundamental rights granted to us be content with those who holds those rights most precious? What should we do? What can we do? I do not know.
What I do know is that American values are worth fighting for, values forged on the front line exactly 240 years ago in 1776 in response to tyranny. Those values were a promise to generations to come, that never again would people be subject to such a gross violation of our humanity. If those values are to survive for another 240 years, we need to start to treasure liberty again, fight for liberty again, no matter the consequences that they may entail. Those men and women back in 1776 were willing to pay the highest price for those rights. They were willing to put their bodies on the front line to secure our liberty. I am willing to do the same. We must be willing to do the same.
