Americans are a forward-thinking people.
What matters to most of us is where we’re going, not where we’ve been.
We don’t devote much attention to our past, which leads us into errors.
The first is that the past doesn’t matter much.
The circumstances of the present — a time in which people, ideas, and capital move at astonishing speed — make whatever lessons the past might offer obsolete. Of course, the people of the past didn’t think they were living in the past.
To them it was always the present and they were astonished by the changes going on around them, just as we are now.
Our circumstances aren’t as unusual as we think.
The second is that the past is a place of darkness and error from which we moderns, who see farther and better, must be free.
This ignores the fact that the people of our past won the freedom we enjoy. They gave us institutions of government to protect and nurture it.
They struggled, each generation building on the last, to build our free society.
Their stories are the foundation of our common culture.
They include the stories of famous men and women, but also of ordinary Americans — of men who rowed Washington across the frozen Delaware, who fought their way up Kings Mountain, of enslaved men and women who won their freedom, and of men who gave their lives in Belleau Wood and on Omaha Beach.
They include the stories of millions who have fought, marched, petitioned, and protested to secure liberty, natural and civil rights, and independence for themselves and others.
These stories are our inheritance, to be told and retold around the campfire of our common culture. How can we cherish freedom and not be inspired by the men and women who won it for us? Who overcame extraordinary challenges to protect it?
Our challenge is to secure our freedom.
This is no simple task because freedom is not a simple idea.
It consists of several ideals — independence, liberty, equality, natural and civil rights, and responsible citizenship under the rule of law — in constant tension.
Personal and national independence are sometimes at odds.
Liberty, the absence of restraint, can conflict with the demands of equality.
The distinctions between natural rights, inherent in the human condition, and civil rights, defined by culture and circumstance, are not always clear.
Responsible citizenship demands sacrifices that limit our freedom.
Our history has been shaped by these tensions since the beginning.
The debates that fill our news, frustratingly petty though they sometimes seem, are ultimately debates about freedom and conflicting ideas of equality, rights, liberty, and personal independence.
If we want to understand these debates, we need to look over our shoulders. "I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience," said Patrick Henry. "I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past."
Without a grasp of our common history, our understanding of the present is confused, and the future is incomprehensible. Planning for the future without a grasp of history, a wise man said, is like planting cut flowers.
Yes, there are Americans who despise our history.
They are either deeply ignorant of the achievements of our past or who seek to undermine respect for our government and our way of life. They seek to pull down, not build up.
They sow division and discord when we should be united in understanding all that we have accomplished and can accomplish if we do so as one people.
We can fix this.
The first step is to rouse the good people. Their silence and apathy holds us back, as much as the falsehoods of those who seek to dismantle our republic and our way of life.
This work will not be easy. Worthwhile things rarely are.
This is a marvelous country and an extraordinary time in which to live. We face great challenges, but they are not greater than the challenges Americans have faced and overcome in the past.
"We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries," Churchill reminds us, "across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy."
We come to the struggle armed with ingenuity and technical abilities our ancestors cannot have imagined. We are generous, creative, productive, wealthy, and strong, with resources beyond calculation.
We are worthy of the challenges we face. Our shared past has made us so.
Jack Warren is an authority on the history of American politics and public life and editor of The American Crisis, an online journal of history and commentary (www.americanideal.org). His newest book is, "Freedom: The Enduring Importance of the American Revolution."
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