America, My America - Part 1

Part 1: My America
I've got a lot on my mind these days. Any moderately conscious person knows that America is divided to an extent not seen since the civil war. And that the tone of our discourse, public, private, or political is less productive than it should be.
But there is one specific worry, one thread, one splinter under my thumbnail, one itch on the sole of my foot, one sharp pain behind my left eye that will. not. stop.
I'm losing my America.
My America, the one that stood, clear-eyed and fearless and said "give me your tired, your poor" and had the audacity to claim it was self-evident that all people were created equal – and then tried and failed and tried and failed and tried some more to live up to those impossible words – is slipping away each day. I can feel it.
There’s an America that built an economy on the backs of people kidnapped from Africa, and using stolen land; then granted those slaves their freedom but then selectively denied them the essential voice of the ballot for another hundred years and then enacted new laws to force racist white men and women to cease that form of oppression; that has now returned to it in the form of subtle and surgically precise methods used to deny the votes of black and brown men and women, and subsequently cured one outbreak of voter suppression in North Carolina and a second in Pennsylvania but allows others to persist in Georgia and Florida. But that’s not exactly my America.
I’m not losing the America of the scrubbed and sanitized histories I was taught in school, that told me about Europe’s “discovery” and (re)settlement of the Americas, but not of the genocide of 130 million indigenous men, women and children. And I’m not losing the taught America of westward expansion and manifest destiny that failed to mention of the Trail of Tears and Wounded Knee. Where I learned of the Civil War and the triumph of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, the end of chattel slavery and their promise of full citizenship and civil rights for former slaves, but not the unforgivable failure to meet those promises in the terror, rape, and murder of Jim Crow. 
No, I’m thinking about my America. I understand the America of our true history, which documents the paradoxical country that defended of freedom against the tyranny of fascism and Naziism but also installed or supported dictators in Chile and Central America and Iran. I’m familiar with the America that refused a home to Jews fleeing the rise of Hitler but rescued Jews from concentration camps less that a decade later. I know the one that today hails Martin Luther King, Jr. as a hero in death but condemned him in life as a radical and an anti-American and assassinated him.
These things were all done by America the country, by America the nation. By the corporate and aggregate grouping of people under a flag and molded into a set of institutions that sometimes enact the will of the majority but too often the whim of the powerful. But I’m not speaking of that. And I’m not speaking of the American government, of institutions that have an unnerving tendency to choose their own preservation over the good of the people or ideals they are intended to serve.
None of those things are sufficient to be my America.
My America must be sought in these words:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Mine is the more perfect, perfectible Union. Mine is that dream to which we aspire, the ideals to which we must cling. It is made not of leaders and heroes, not of building or monuments, not even of national symbols like our flag. Because these are people and things. And no matter how good and how loved, they are still intrinsically flawed and transient. They can fail or be corrupted or fall short. They all pass away. Which is why the oath of office of the President does not say she will defend our institutions or preserve our government or protect our people or our actions or our history. Instead, it says he will “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Because the Constitution is not just the document carefully preserved in the National Archives. It is ideas expressed in word and given flesh and bone and concrete and steel by people who honor, apply, and live out those ideas.
My America is an idea.

Like any truly great idea it must be both shared and carefully tended if it is to survive, much less burgeon and prosper. Should we hoard it and build a high wall or fence of steel slats around it, it will wither. Should we hew only to its symbols and forget that they mean not just respect for the military but also mean the right to live without fear of mistreatment or murder by police, the idea of America will atrophy and fade. And when we discard its principles in the interest of expediency or gain, we tarnish and corrode the institutions that should reflect our ideal America.
That is where we begin, because my America is slipping away. Now.

Tomorrow:

Part 2: America Besieged