“The past,” said the minister, “must not be a roadblock to the present.” I took his thought out of religion and into politics.
It is easy to forget, in the current political climate, that American society has followed a road of ever-advancing moral maturity in the face of traumas. Through a civil war we abolished slavery. The Great Depression led us to bring a starving populace back to life with the New Deal. After WWII, we made a thriving middle class thanks to the GI Bill and a focus on education and affordable housing. Our reaction to the Civil Rights Movement abolished segregation laws and finally gave Blacks the vote. At each turn, national trauma led to another step forward in moral reckoning. Each time, America proved its moral center to be the rights of mankind.
The Great Again Movement is today’s roadblock. It says, let’s chip away the legal framework of progress and go back to an undefined era of narrower opportunity. It says, too many ordinary people are voting, so let’s corral their rights. Let’s shrink the dialogue in schools, so that upstarts know their place. In that mythical past, a few special people knew better than all the others. Today, Great Again Movement members believe they are those special ones.
The present is too far along on America’s journey toward moral decency to give in to such a past. We know more now, and we will not unlearn. We know the importance of ordinary people. We know the improvements a diverse society breeds. We know what stabililty and decency feel like. We live in our moral center. There is no going back.
The current state of the body politic, marked by cruelty, dishonesty and a preference for dogfights, is the product of the Great Again Movement. Facing it, we are called to believe in our moral roots that will not be severed. Once again, in answer to trauma, to a roadblock, moral good sense must rise like yeast. When it does, we will prosper like so many generations before us.
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