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Our country was founded 250 years ago based on a set of core values (Ideals). The Declaration of Independence (1776) states that all men are created equal. The US Constitution (1788) establishes that government authority comes from the citizens not a monarch or elite class. The Bill of Rights (1791) focuses on protection of individual liberties from government power. These ideals were radical in their day, upending the world of authoritarian rule. The struggle to protect these American Ideals did not end with the Bill of Rights. In the 1860s, civil war broke out to end slavery. This fight to end slavery teetered on a key phrase in the Declaration of Independence that states that all men are created equal. Abraham Lincoln stated in his Gettysburg Address in 1863: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. … that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” It took nearly a decade to pass the 15th amendment, which gave all men the right to vote regardless of race. In the early 1900s, the Women’s Suffrage movement succeeded, after decades of struggle, to change that key phrase in our Declaration of Independence from “all men are created equal” to “all people are created equal” with the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920. The struggles for human dignity and liberties are long and nowhere near an end. That said, we continue to strive for a more perfect union. We are again at a crossroads. Our nation is polarized, the American “experiment” is at risk. We need to ask each other some fundamental questions: The list of questions we must ask now is too long for this newsletter, but you get the idea. We believe that humanity is strongest when we act with Compassion. With Compassion, we begin healing our social fabric and weakening the walls of polarization.
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