A Declaration of Independence
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
Robert Frost
Last week, to celebrate the 4th of July, I reread The Declaration of Independence. Born into a military family, patriotism is part of my DNA. I’ve been to Independence Hall in Philadelphia, walked the blood-soaked ground of Gettysburg, and stood in quiet reverence next to the original copy of the Constitution in the National Archives Museum. Once on a trip to visit my sister and her husband at his then Air Force assignment, we toured the home of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America–the Beauvoir estate in Biloxi, Mississippi. On that road trip across the country to see my sister’s family, I read aloud to my children a National Geographic History of the Civil War. The youngest,–Son #6, then only eight years old—struggled to stay awake as I read, but he insisted we review anything he missed if he unintentionally dozed off. Even a eight-year old recognized the importance and the power of our history’s influence.
It’s been a very long time since I had actually read the words of the Declaration. It was a revelation to discover how much more those ideas meant to me at this reading than at any time in my life before. Over the years I’ve had opportunity to study a good bit of history and philosophy, and I’ve lived through some of America’s most acrimonious periods of contention including the Civil Rights movement, the Viet Nam War, and Women’s Rights demands among others. In my view, there is only one way—divine inspiration–to explain how a group of men with wildly divergent ideas about what their new country should look like could set aside their own egos, financial considerations, and personal political biases to agree on a document which has been a lighthouse for democracy to every group of people “yearning to breathe free” since its inception in 1776.
At the moment the level dissention in this country may be the highest I’ve seen in my lifetime. My dad used to say that “dissention is self-defeating” when I was arguing with my brothers about whose turn it was to do the dishes or whether or not the Detroit Tigers were going to win the pendent. In an unexpected turn of events, forty or so years later I became a politician for a couple of terms. Often when I walked the halls of the Utah State Capitol and heard angry voices, my dad’s words rang in my ears. I looked up the term “dissention”—by definition dissension implies strife or discord and stresses a division into factions. But it was also heartening that the most often repeated phrase I heard from legislators was, “help me understand your point of view”.
When I was in seventh grade, all female students were required to take “swimming” as part of the PE program. (Boys, too, but certainly NOT in the same classes!) I thought it was pretty cool to get to play in the water for an hour daily, especially since very few public-school sports were open to girls, even in the late fifties. Nice girls did gymnastics, cheerleading (in VERY modest costumes), tennis, volleyball, and maybe golf if a girl’s parents could afford it. Most of the rest of sport categories were male territory only. I was well into adulthood when I watched in profound awe as the Supreme Court weighted in on Title Nine requiring non-discrimination and compliance requirements apply to any educational institution that receives federal financial assistance through grants provided directly to its students. It’s embarrassing to admit that by the time I became a teacher, more than once I sat in the bleachers, tears running down my cheeks, as I watched Daughter #2 play high school varsity basketball—something I could never have imagined possible during my own high school career.
But attitudes are changing again. Many young female athletes are protesting the emergence of trans-gender students now competing against them—a concern which, I can certainly understand. Male and female biology have different strengths and weaknesses. Where is the equity in pitting one against the other in what might be an unfair and unequal weighing of capability? For young women especially, years of dedicated training and commitment seem threatened by a situation for which they literally have no physical defense. On the other hand, I have an extended family member who is 15 years-old and trans-gender. Although s/he is not competitively athletic, s/he—like a small group of her/his fellow citizens–is caught up in a tornado of conflicting emotions and yearnings which have engulfed all of them. S/he is about enter high school and is terrified that s/he will face bullying and isolation. Where are the boundaries for her/his “unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”?
Society is filled with voices yelling in behalf of one side or the other, but as far as I can tell, my dad is still right: dissention is self-defeating. Hurling insults at one another may be emotionally satisfying to the combatant for a moment or two, but it causes unearned and unnecessary pain for the innocent on both sides—whatever the conflict. And it makes reasonable resolution almost impossible. For nearly 250 years our nation has chosen to resolve disagreements through a system of law and order—one of the direct results of The Declaration of Independence which declares that “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them (this people—all of them) a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” That’s something too many of our current citizens seem to have forgotten,—or even worse–have chosen to ignore.