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And justice for all

Still yearning to breathe free

The sun is up. The flag is out. Justice for all is still elusive. As is our country treating all of us as if we really were created equal.

I mistrust public pieties. As much as Jesus mistrusted hypocrites who pray in public “that they may be seen by others.” As much as the immediate past president’s flag hugging. The phoniness, it burns.

But still, as with relations we love despite annoying flaws and uninformed opinions, yes, liberals do still love their country. Shining through its dappled history are snippets of grace we cling to like the hope that that sibling or aunt or uncle or cousin retains the potential to be more than pedestrian.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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.

It took a few years for the generation that declared independence from England to hash out just what they thought a more perfect union might look like. They did not get it quite right. (My God, the flaws!) But they allowed for their new country to be what it remains to this day, like the rest of us, a work in progress.

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.

The work of perfection is never done, an asymptote never reached. There is grace in the striving, though, despite countrymen whose sense of the country is cramped by prejudice and fear never fully overcome.

Standing in New York harbor is the statue bearing on its pedestal the 1883 Emma Lazarus poem that, once again, speaks to American aspirations that, when fear and prejudice are at an ebb, lift hearts and spirits, reminding us of what we could and should be.

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

An avenue near here today will be lined with American flags. Americans today, many from the far right, will ritualistically pledge allegiance to it “and to the Republic for which it stands,” not realizing they are words most often attributed to Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister and Christian socialist (though that may be incorrect).

one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all

Still working on all four on the Fourth.

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