America's Unfinished Revolution: A Reflection for the 4th of July

Hey friends, my apologies for being a really infrequent blogger of late.

To all American friends, Happy Independence Day to you all. I won’t lie to you- you all know me too well; I think that America has hard times ahead as it attempts to ride out and resist the worst impulses of a bad President and the rot of nativism, populism and plutocracy.

In the shadow of it all, it is so easy to lose sight of the historic and radical origins of this day; to be so sickened by over-ripened hubris and faux patriotism of the day that you might just abandon it all to the 'America First' fanatics.

I refuse to roll over so easily. 

Why? Because I'm a revolutionary, and this is my day... 

I grew up in the New York/New Jersey area, so the Revolutionary period was all around me. My parents’ house was built in 1775; the area is filled with historical sights dating to the 1700’s; I took several school field trips to Washington’s Headquarters, Jockey Hollow and other sites.

But the American Revolution should not be confused with the War of Independence, though of course they historically overlap;

The War of Independence was fought between 1775 and 1783; the Revolution goes far beyond that.

The American Revolution was- and is- a collection of ideas, a new and completely untried set of beliefs about humanity, power, politics, and national culture.

How would one sum up the American Revolution of Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, and Paine?

Individual rights instead of group rights;

A Bill of Rights that explicitly lays them out;

Implacable hostility to monarchy or absolutism in any form;

The rule of law;

Equality before the law;

Separation of Powers;

Separation of the power of the State and the practice of religion;

*All* of that is worth celebrating and *should* be celebrated; not through jingo-ism or cod patriotism, but by demanding that that Revolution be made permanent.

The American Revolution continued long after the War of Independence ended; if it hadn’t, the great experiment in North American democracy would have ended centuries ago.

Needless to say, the rights and roles of women at the beginning of America were largely either ignored or left impossibly vague by the founders;

Native Americans were explicitly referred to in the Declaration of Independence as ‘merciless Indian savages’;   

African-Americans were either (at worst) property or (at best) fifth-class free citizens;

I could go on; The American Revolution has been shot through with racism, class warfare, and white privilege.

But…

A great strength of the American Revolution- and one that should never be overlooked- has been its flexibility and its historic ability to encompass the struggle to make it more encompassing than it originally was. 

It includes the built-in mechanism of the right to disagree, to dissent, to freely and explicitly point out when it’s not working or not working for everybody.

It gives you the right to say, ‘what about me?’ ‘What about us?’

The freedom to speech and expression in the US Constitution is not simply the freedom to praise the nation, its institutions and its leadership (for that reason alone it outstrips the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban Revolutions); the American Revolution carries the promise that you may declare your nation unjust, deficient, uncaring, one-sided, in need of reform.

Thus, the struggle for women’s suffrage was a battle of the Revolution;

The anti-slavery movement, up to and including Black Lives Matter, is a battle of the Revolution;

The Stonewall Uprising was a battle of the Revolution;

Standing Rock was a battle of the Revolution;

When we demand the end to detention camps and the separation of families at the southern border;

When we demand that identical processes exist if one wants to build a mosque or a church;

When we demand that treaties be honoured and that the US government keep its word;

When we demand that every person- regardless of who they are- have the same chance of surviving a routine encounter with a cop;

This is all the American Revolution, and each 4 July is always a day for Americans, if they so desire, to re-focus, re-center, and to remember their Revolution- imperfect, unfinished, yes; but ongoing and (hopefully) permanent... 

and worth defending...