America is both a belief and a fact
Reforming what it means to be American will prevent us from needing to impeach a president twice and still have those who will not convict him (or her)
vol. 3 issue 9
Greetings,
Watching the impeachment hearings, it is patently clear there is a significant swathe of the american population that seems to want to return to a once-upon-a-time of what it meant to be an american, the one that the former president told them they were entitled to. Except, it’s an America that, frankly, has never factually existed, certainly not as an entity engaged in official domestic and world affairs.
No matter. Facts do not overcome tightly held beliefs, the ones these people have held for decades, even though it wasn’t until P45 came along as the “official” messenger that their beliefs were actually true, that they then were unleashed to defend those beliefs as reality, since who needs facts when you can have alternate facts? It’s the best of all worlds.
The phenomenon of people putting faith over facts when it serves them will not change. But I suggest we do have a way to prevent it from taking us into the depths of hell where we as a nation are currently incinerating ourselves.
First, let me share my own beliefs. I believe that America is an ideal more than a place. A nation’s boundaries are often cultural impositions on a land, they are not necessarily of the land itself. Rivers, mountains, deserts, oceans…these divide us, but we find ways to cross them, even if they shape and contain the “spirit” of a place.
Since our nation’s inception, people have dreamed of coming to America, have raptured over the idea of our democratic freedoms, and so, without ever having to step foot on the land that is America, they have known it in their hearts. Many of them do come, and make what is in their hearts manifest in their reality.
In that way, America is simultaneously a belief and a fact. She is also dynamic.
America, the Ideal is fluid, just as all ideas are fluid. This means she can move with us as we evolve, change according to our needs, shape herself around our spirit as it expands, breathes, and takes flight. We can carry “America, the Ideal” within us, just as we can let it carry us within it simply by being Americans.
Even Originalists must see that the Constitution was created to be dynamic, not static. Expanding the rights out from all men being created equal to it being all humans being created equal was the natural evolution of America, the Ideal.
The primacy of men in the language of the Constitution was not just the convention of the time, it was simply self-referencing since the framers had come by their power and position due to their being land-holding white men who desired the pursuit of freedom from the Crown. Still, inherent in the Constitutional promise they conceived for the pursuit of happiness, is the notion that happiness will be unique to the person pursuing it, even if the language of the time defined persons as “men”.
We cannot take seriously anyone who would claim originalism so strictly as to become both absurd and abstract to mean that today only men are those entitled to pursue their happiness as Americans. To insist upon this is not only regressive, it’s anti-American. By that I mean, it is anti-growth. It is stasis. It rejects America in favor of death.
And so, America, the Ideal, has maintained her integrity while also changing her shape to accommodate our needs, our progress, our evolution – and all Americans regardless of gender, are equal and free to pursue happiness.
With this in mind, to me, the solution for our current hellacious insanity is obvious. It’s to return to our original mission statement, the one our founders adopted because of its elegance and dynamic nature: e pluribus unum, and the one we supplanted in the 1950s with “In God We Trust” as a publicity stunt to wave our flag up the faces of the Soviets.
But, God is not the one who has to deal with the fall out of the dumb stuff we do.
Out of many, one is a dynamic notion. It is imperfect by its very nature. It implies the constant assembling of many parts, fitting them together, dissembling some, integrating others. There is no translation of the phrase to mean “Out of many, one and done”. Instead, it implies we have to stay vigilant to whether or not the One is actually working. And for that, we need to be awake and alive to it as mature adults, not sleepwalking children of God.
Because I have not heard a single plan from the “true believers”, the insurrectionists, the supporters of P45, nor even his Congressional enablers, of what the actual end game is supposed to be if he were restored to power, I have to think the push to keep a man around who only wants to play golf and be adored – given that he shunned any pretense of governing months before the election, fully abdicating taking a lead role in addressing the pandemic – is because “In God We Trust” is good enough for them.
These children of God don’t need a plan. They don’t need to be responsible. P45 is their messiah, their messenger, and just having him means that a message from God or Q or (fill in the blank) is bound to come and tell them what to do, right? I mean…the message will come, right? March 4th it will come, right? I mean, January 6th was a message, right? I mean… right?
The problem with trusting in God as a means of governance is that it institutionalizes belief over facts. And yet, God cannot be proven, no matter how many of us, myself included, believe in God’s existence. It’s pretty squishy territory.
How are we supposed to hold God accountable for anything? We can’t. God is not only above the law, because we have no idea what God actually is, God is outside of the law.
Further, if God is perfect, as religions claim, then he’s static. And really, why is he a he? How do we even know that? We don’t. It’s a convention from the past.
And that is the point. In God We Trust is anti-American and anti-growth. It insists that we are already a perfect union, not one that is fluid, accommodating the expansion of our spirit. It ties us to the past and leaves us tethered there. It destroys any hope of evolving, of creating a “more perfect union”, and most damning of all, it doesn’t make us have to be accountable as humans for the actions we and our leaders take.
Instead, we wait for messengers from God. Messiahs. Qs and Ts. And then, nothing constructive gets done does it? We end up fighting and impeaching and hating and insurrecting.
Trusting in God to govern leads only to “conspirituality”, a term coined by British researchers a decade ago, to describe how marginalized fringe spiritual groups eventually merge in order to rebel and destroy hidden autocratic forces trying to strip them of their freedom to believe whatever they believe. A kind of jockeying for “My God is better than your God”, and in a land where if its in God we trust and your God reigns supreme, well, hey, hey, hey! Look who’s top dog now! I don’t have to work with you low-lifes because your God sucks, mine is better, and there is no reason to integrate the rest of you because you’re a bunch of losers.
Uh, head scratch. Isn’t Q a mysterious hidden power whose will must be done, which does kinda make him or it autocratic, right?
Whatever. Keep your Q if he/it makes you happy, because that is your right. But, that is not my God. I am certain my idea of God is different from most people’s. And in a hierarchy of Gods, that’s a problem, but in a nation of people in fused with the spirit of a place, it’s merely a curiosity.
This is why people who believe in ideals but deal in facts, precedent, and the rule of law have to be in charge of our democracy, not God. Not his messengers, not any supernatural being or its emissary.
Yet, not putting God in charge doesn’t mean we aren’t facing a spiritual reformation in this country. All great belief systems eventually undergo a reformation. Catholics got Vatican II. Judaisim got Reform Judaism. Even Buddhists are now faced with having to question their beliefs now that some of their adherents are committing genocide of the Rohingya. Islam is experiencing this in the face of its extremists, too. France, Italy, Germany…they’ve had several empires and republics. Now it’s our turn.
This isn’t just an impeachment trial. It’s a rite of passage, the dawning of our American reformation, or at least it can be.
By viewing America as an ideal, not a finite thing, we can examine our national spirit and let it shape and carry us, as we shape ourselves to accommodate it in the way that suits us each best.
And without the nonsense of waiting for God to deliver the news to people already infused with the true spirit of America, I am confident and even optimistic, we will keep democracy alive and our nation intact.
E pluribus unum. It is the shape of who we truly are.
Peace,
Whitney
ICYMI…
'Slow medicine', dark money, and the future of healthcare: a conversation with Dr. Victoria Sweet
Things like “patient care”, the so-called triple aim of “the best patient experience, with the best possible outcome, for the lowest possible cost”, or patient “throughput”, the operational term used to describe how long a patient remains the responsibility of a discrete health system – these have absolutely nothing to do with actual healing. Nothing.
To read the rest of this docu-mental post and to hear my interview with Dr. Victoria Sweet, author of God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine, and Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing, become a patron subscriber.