What Really is Essential
Four score and seven years ago near the dawn of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt set forth the proposition that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Now we are engaged in a great global pandemic, testing whether our nation can long endure a polarized political and social climate that promotes fear, mistrust, anger, ignorance and division. We are met on many battlefields from who wears and not wears masks to armed protests on state capitol grounds to seeing persons of color once again being brutalized as we “reopen” America. Fueled by uncertainty, insecurity and powerlessness we demonize and dehumanize each other. Each day we absorb the vitriolic tweets from the White House as a little bit of our common decency dies. These battles diminish us and erode the resilience of democratic society.
At the same time, we have honored health care and other essential workers who have risked and sometimes given their lives so others might live. We have sheltered in place for the good of the whole — often sacrificing our lifestyles and our livelihoods. But, in a larger sense, our most pivotal challenge now is how we rededicate ourselves to the unfinished work of the American promise. The world is taking note and will long remember what we say and do here in this crisis. At stake is the bedrock of our national covenant — all people are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. At Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln reclaimed this American promise. A century later, Martin Luther King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial reclaimed it again by saying: Now is the time to make justice a reality for all God’s children.
Despair, disease and disunion spread when we lose faith in the very institutions designed to protect and nourish our democratic ideals and rights. Entitled privilege and abuse of power run the show. Again, we find ourselves lost in the wilderness but there is no Lincoln, Roosevelt or King speaking or tweeting from our national capitol about why equality, justice and compassion are essential to the American way of life. The crisis we really face is not the Coronavirus. It is a fear itself virus that keeps us from speaking truth to corrupt and abusive power. It is essential that we ignore the daily insidious rants from the bully pulpit and speak from our hearts so that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
