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Anita Kurth of Bangor is a retired English teacher.
I’ve been thinking recently about two quotes. The first is a phrase from the Pledge of Allegiance, recited daily in grade school: ”Indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” What a grand promise! It can still bring goose bumps these many decades later.
The other is one I’ve heard from several voters lately: “I’m better off than I was four years ago. Financially, I’m doing well. I’m voting for Trump.”
What a divide we’ve come to, between a vision of the common good and a kind of individualism that doesn’t care what else happens, as long as I’m well off.
We are a nation at a tipping point. We have a president, supported by his majority in the U.S. Senate and his followers, who encourages us to mistrust our own election processes, government agencies, responsible journalism, and any city or state that disagrees with him. He suggests the possibility of illegally continuing in office even if he loses the election. He chums up with dictators. His list of offenses, personal and potentially even criminal, is seemingly endless.
Encouraged by like-minded people, he has manipulated our worst instincts, promoting a climate of hate and turning what were once ripples of disagreement into torrents. We’re divided as a people, in a way reminiscent of the late 1960s. Then, the issue was the Vietnam War. Now, the question seems to be what we want our nation — and ourselves — to be.
Can we truly be indivisible and embrace all our people, regardless of our tribe? Can we have true liberty, which would mean — among other things — owning our bodies without government intervention, speaking our own truths freely, and living our own lives, no matter how they might differ from our neighbors’, without fear of mockery or penalty? Can we acknowledge systemic inequities and arrive, somehow, at justice for all?
For some of us, apparently none of that matters. We’re only looking at our own bottom line, our own little bubble of friends like us, locked into our own notions of how life should be. Somehow, the goal of the common good has been shoved aside.
At this agonizing moment in our history, when many experts believe that our democracy truly hangs in the balance, it’s not a bad idea to go back to first principles. A third very common quote comes to mind: “Of the people, by the people, and for the people.” That’s “the people,” you and I and all of us. It’s not “the ones who think as I do,” or “the authoritarian leader” or “the ones whose 401(k) is looking good.”
We the people need to take back our government and our nation. For the common good.