Our ongoing revolution

Thomas Jefferson, who owned more than 600 human beings, penned the stirring words justifying a revolution creating what would become the most prosperous, principled and powerful in human history. The seeming contradiction — that someone whose life and wealth was made possible by exploiting and abusing other people could write down the radical assertion “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” — encapsulates United States history as neatly as any other.

Our forefathers, or the forefathers of a small fraction of us, dissolved their bonds with Britain, and then came a war in which bombs burst in air and, through the dust and the death, the red, white and blue flag flew higher. We were not colonies but a nation, an idealistic and energetic nation with near-fatal moral blindness it would take another hundred or so years to begin to overcome.

Traitors intent on keeping humans in bondage tried to sever the bonds between the states, but they could not. Mostly together, we kept moving in fits and starts toward a better version of our union. Black men gained the rights that should have always been theirs; so did women, and workers, and a long litany of immigrants and others thought to be worth less than those who ruled the roost.

Even today, as we hold fast to our rights, we struggle to honor the promise of equal creation in a nation in which too many are still tied down by the worst threads in our history.

We fend off people who consider themselves patriots, revolutionaries inspired by a liar, who stormed the Capitol to dissolve their bonds with their own democratic Republic, who threaten the next free election. We grow increasingly internally apart, as a supermajority in our highest court enforces a narrow and dangerous vision of our freedoms that the majority of the population rejects. Our contradictions define us still.