Well, Dwight, just for starters I think we should remember that "all men were created equal" meant white men to the fathers of our country. It did not mean women, and it did not mean black men, or other people of color. And isn't it true that only property owners could vote? And we killed the Indians and stole their land. What a lot to be proud about!! While the words are nice, they ring hollow. While the idea of freedom has lived on, the details need to change over time. I guess that is why we have a Congress and a Supreme Court, to keep the essence of the revolutionists' ideas but interpret them for modern times.
President Clinton said something that I found very interesting last night in response to a question from a Chinese student after a speech at a university there. He related the story of a Greek immigrant in New York, who had approached him during the 1992 campaign, saying that he would vote for Clinton if he could make his ten-year-old son free.
Clinton asked him what he meant, and he said that there was so much violence and street crime in his neighborhood that his child was not even free to play outside or go to school on his own. The point Clinton was making is that there are several kinds of freedom, and that the freedoms the Constitution and the Bill of Rights guarantee us in the absence of a general social calm and peace where we are free to come and go and feel relatively safe in our everyday lives, is not really ample freedom. And I think we should remember looking at it this way, many Americans are not free at all. |
