In Abraham Lincoln’s time America was known as “the last best hope of mankind”. Ronald Reagan resurrected the old Puritan mantra and referred to our country as “that shining city upon a hill’. But what are we today. Our politics is uncivil and negative, featuring the politics of personal destruction. Sick individuals shoot indiscriminately at students in schools and parishioners at church. We see the renewal of race based violence.
So how do we get past this? How do we regain our faith in the future and move progressively forward? When the British crown tired to impose its will by bayonet on the citizens of Boston, Americans became Angry. We fought and won a great war for independence. But it was not the Anger we became known for it was the principle of freedom for which men fought and died that became the symbol of America to the world. We should once again become a civil nation where everyone agrees to let others live their lives without interference as long as they do no harm to others. We should again practice a politics of consensus and compromise. We should lead the nations of the world not as a great military or economic power but as the great moral arbiter we were viewed as when we entered the two World Wars of the last century.
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