Let Freedom Ring

Martin Luther King Day, 2012

2012-01-16T16:00:00.000-08:00

I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech

1964

I grew up in an America that had an abiding faith in itself and what America stood for. My grandparents—together with my infant mother—were those huddled masses yearning to be free. Like so many others, they emigrated to America to escape the Anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe. My father was the first in his family to go to college. He and my uncles fought for freedom, defeating the Germans in World War II. Theirs was the story of millions of immigrants who had come to this American nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Except, we hadn’t all come to America free and equal. Some of us had been brought here to be slaves, to be the chattel of other men, to be bought and sold like cattle, with no regard for husband or wife, mother or father, son or daughter.

I grew up in an America where legally-mandated segregation was reality. In America’s South, Blacks could not vote, could not drink from “White Only” water fountains, could not eat at “White Only” lunch counters, could not swim in “White Only” pools, and could not pray in “White Only” churches. Black children were educated in segregated schools, separate although far from equal. Black men felt the need to cross the street when a white man was coming, fearing for themselves and their families. In the 1920s, the decade of King’s birth, there were nearly 500 lynchings of Blacks by Whites in America.

It turns out that we the people didn’t mean ALL the people. It didn’t mean the slaves, nor did it mean their descendants. Nor did it mean the Native Americans whose lands we took as our own.

The Civil Rights Movement, the period when I came of political age, like the Civil War before it, exposed this fault-line in the American ideal, the lie in our creed that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. We weren’t all created equal, not at our founding, not in 1860, not in 1960. And we still aren’t created equal today.

In the 44 years since King’s assassination, we have become considerably less equal. While the details are open to interpretation, the overwhelming conclusion by just about any measure is that the rich have gotten considerably richer while the poor have gotten poorer.

It is not class warfare to acknowledge this. The children of the rich have greater opportunity than do the children of the poor; they are born more equal than poor children, with far greater opportunities for Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It would be class warfare if one argued that we the people should confiscate the riches of the wealthy few and distribute them to the many poor. But this would not be just. Nor would it square with our creed of equality.

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

But it’s not class warfare to point out that we the people are all in this together. It’s not class warfare when Warren Buffett argues that the rich have a responsibility to pay higher taxes noting that he pays a lower tax rate than his office staff. Nor is it class warfare when Elizabeth Warren, running for Senate in Massachusetts, says: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory... Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

We are in the midst of the 2012 Presidential election cycle, one that already appears destined to be about our religious and economic values. To vote wisely we will have to reflect on how we the people can best allocate our scarce resources so all have opportunity, where all contribute, where none are left out. Class warfare isn’t the answer. Nor is pure laissez faire capitalism. We the people must give birth to a new way.

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

When we believe in the dream, when we keep our faith that one day America will rise up and live out the true meaning of our creed, that’s when we are ready to step up and do our part to make it happen. Imagine if we the people committed to treating each other with respect, with understanding, with compassion and with that special feeling that we are part of a shared American community. Miracles occur in the strangest of places.

Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Our problems won’t vanish simply because we live America’s creed. There are no silver bullets in a world as complex as ours.

But as we live America’s creed, we unleash our imagination, our creativity, our ability to work hard, our sense of community, our readiness for shared-sacrifice, our entrepreneurial spirit; all those qualities that define what is exceptional in America.

Martin Luther King’s faith is our faith, we the people. It is a faith born out of our religious traditions, our shared experiences, our sacrifices and our successes. It is a faith that lives strong in our hearts — infused by our creed that all men are created equal and reflected in our responsibility, we the people, to form that more perfect union, to establish justice, to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. It is a faith that knows no color, a faith that knows no gender or sexual preference, a faith that resides in red states and blue, for King’s faith is the faith of America.

So on this day when we celebrate the anniversary of that glorious day when the universe brought Martin Luther King Jr. to us, let us commit ourselves anew to the sacred task that lies before us; to live out the true meaning of America’s creed, our creed, yours and mine, we the people.

Let freedom ring.

Thanksgiving, 2011

2011-11-24T12:27:00.000-08:00

These are the times that try men’s souls.

Thomas Paine

The skies remain dark this Thanksgiving. The greatest economic recession since the great depression is entering its fourth year. Sixteen percent of workers are either unemployed or have dropped out of the labor market. Our leaders in Congress are split into ideological camps, unable to agree on what needs to be done. We have stopped trusting each other. We have stopped listening to each other. We have closed our hearts to each other. Our wounds fester. We have become bitter towards one another. The Blessings of Liberty are in jeopardy, for ourselves and our posterity.

It is a time again to remember what we are thankful for.

Let’s start with my parent’s generation, that great generation of men and women, those children of the depression who defeated the enemies of freedom in World War II and created the vital alliances that kept us safe during the cold war and the dismantling of colonialism around the world. Their simple example of ordinary men and women working together, doing what needs to be done, sacrificing for us, their children and grandchildren, offers us much to be thankful for.

It is not just my parent’s generation but ordinary men and women throughout our history to whom we are thankful. It was these ordinary men and women, coming to the new world to escape religious intolerance in Europe, who brought us our first Thanksgiving, bringing with them their commitment to a civil body politick, perhaps the first requirement of self-government.

At a time when we, the people, are anything but a civil body politick, it’s important to be thankful to the founders, to reflect on the ideals of the Declaration they bequeathed to us, that all of us are created equal, endowed with inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We need to be thankful as well to the final words of the Declaration: we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. We are all in this together, that is the sacred commitment we make to one another, from that deepest place in our heart. For this we are thankful.

Securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity requires that we bring our very best intellect to the challenges we face. There are no simple solutions to our challenges, no silver bullets. We are going to have to think our way through them and that requires at a minimum our ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving. That you and I can think as well as we do is reason to give thanks to the intellectual giants on whose shoulders we stand: Socrates and Plato, Galileo and Newton, Descartes and Locke, Franklin, Jefferson and Adams, Darwin and Einstein, along with every teacher we have ever had.

We give thanks to those who have brought us wisdom from the gods, from that place of the spirit where we are all one: Jesus, Hillel, Mohammed, Buddha, Lao Tzu. Confucius. Love they neighbor as thyself. That which is hateful to you, do not do to another. Not one of you is a believer until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself. Liberty and justice for all is not a zero-sum game of winners and losers but a moral conviction, a faith in the miracle of cooperation where we all win together.

America—at our best—speaks with this voice of the spirit, this voice of profound cooperation. During the cold winter of World War II, Judge Learned Hand reflected the Golden Rule in the spirit of liberty:

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.

We are thankful this Thanksgiving for all those who have come before, each generation bequeathing us gifts: the gift of liberty and justice, of freedom and equality, of knowledge and wisdom, of love and compassion, of courage and shared sacrifice, of cooperation and sacred honor.

There is much to be done in America … and the world. It is not enough—in these trying times—that we spend a day in thanks with family and friends, only to return to our lives tomorrow, to the gridlock that is America, unchanged, as if nothing had happened.

This is not only the time to give thanks for our blessings—the blessings of liberty. It is a time to redouble our efforts to pass on these blessings to our posterity. This is our responsibility, our commitment to the founders, our sacred duty—and also our joy, for what beyond the laughter of a child is more joyful than seeing that child grow up free, imbued with the spirit of liberty, pursuing the happiness that lies in his or her heart.

America has an election in less than a year. The voices we hear are the voices of divisions. The voices we need to hear are the voices of unity. It is time once again to ask not what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country. This is the only thanks that truly matters this Thanksgiving: that we do for others what others have done for us. Otherwise it’s just words.

In the darkest days of World War II, Winston Churchill wrote: Our qualities must burn and glow through the gloom … until they become the veritable beacon of [our] salvation.

As this year’s winter descends over America, it becomes more important than ever to hold fast to the spirit of liberty so that we may emerge from our time of crisis as earlier generations of Americans emerged from theirs, with a deeper sense of social justice, a clearer vision of human welfare and happiness, a renewed spirit of mutual helpfulness to translate vision into reality, and a strengthened commitment to work together intelligently and compassionately for the betterment of mankind.

As we give thanks this Thanksgiving, let us rededicate ourselves to the cause of freedom, to creating that shining city on the hill where all are created equal so that we may soon say “The winter of our discontent is over. Springtime has returned to America.”

Let freedom ring.

Constitution Day, 2011

2011-09-17T10:42:00.000-07:00

I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!

Howard Beale

Network

The options considered by the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention were broad. What kind of government were we to have? When the Convention ended, anxious citizens waiting outside Independence Hall wanted to know what had been produced behind those closed doors. The answer was provided immediately. A Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Without hesitation, Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Here we are, 224 years later, their posterity, inheritors of the greatest Blessings of Liberty the world has ever known … at a time of deep global, social, cultural, political and economic challenge … with a Congress having historically low approval ratings and a President whose approval ratings keep falling.

A republic, if we can keep it.

“We are in the very midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world.”

John Adams

July, 1776

Thirteen years before the Constitutional Convention in 1776 we were mad as hell ... at the Monarchy and the British Parliament ... and in our refusal to take it anymore our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

A hundred and fifty years ago, again mad as hell—but this time at each other—we engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. By the time our Civil War ended 4 years later, over 600,000 American soldiers lay dead. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes learned from his battle-field experiences in the Civil War, “certitude leads to violence.”

And now it’s our turn to be mad as hell—mad at Congress, mad at the President, mad at the Supreme Court, mad at corporations who pay no taxes while shipping jobs overseas, mad at the insurance and drug companies, perhaps the only beneficiaries of Obamacare, mad at gays and lesbians and fundamentalists and atheists—mad at each other.

Just like 1776 and 1861, we are mad as hell and we aren’t taking it anymore. Through our fury, though, we must answer a fundamental question: “What are we going to do about it?” Do we go to war with each other, like we did in 1861? Or do we find an alternative?

If two people work for me and they agree all the time, one of them is worthless. If they disagree all the time, they’re both worthless.

Sam Goldwyn

Fundamental to American liberty are factions. As Madison taught us factions are as American as apple pie. Different people think differently and have different interests. Those with similar attitudes and objectives often bond together, seeking to accomplish their agenda in the political marketplace. The result is faction. Liberty, as Madison so wisely understood, was the very cause of faction.

To eliminate factions is to destroy liberty, replacing it with tyranny; a remedy … worse than the disease, as Madison put it. Factions are evidence of the resiliency of liberty and it is through their growth and decay that the blessings of liberty evolve through history.

So factions we must have. Indeed we should glory in them, for they are the very expression of the liberties we hold so dear.

Except right now, our factions are mad as hell at each other. And we’ve got work to do. Difficult challenges to solve. A future to build. Right now, at this moment in our history, in the midst of all of our anger at each other, our factions are proving worthless.

America is 14 months away from our next election. Republican candidates are already lining up for the opportunity to take on Obama. The House and Senate are both in play. The media is ecstatic as interest is high. And we know from our long history that politicians play to their constituents.

It would be the height of naivety to expect there to be any lessening of factional anger before the election; indeed, factional anger will most likely rise as we get closer to the election.

But that doesn’t say that we the people have to stay mad as hell, that we have to buy into the institutional anger in our midst. Each one of us has the opportunity to personally get past his or her own set of angers, not to take it, but to work to prepare the ground for what we will need after November 2012.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field.

I'll meet you there.

Rumi.

Out beyond our anger live the verities, those eternal truths that have shown up over the course of our sojourn on our home planet, truths about how we connect to each other, how we build trust, how we learn to cooperate.

The first of these great truths is the Golden Rule, a general principle found in all of mankind’s traditions: Treat others as you would be treated. Love others as you love yourself.

The Declaration—that we are all created equal, with equal rights—is but a political corollary of the Golden Rule. We all want liberty for ourselves. Therefore, there must be liberty for all. We are all created equal.

So today, the 224^th anniversary of the American republic, at the beginning of our mad dash to what Jon Stewart calls “Indecision 2012,”it’s time to slow down, take a deep breath and remember Lincoln’s words from his first Inaugural Address:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Let freedom ring.

Independence Day, 2011

2011-07-04T01:10:00.000-07:00

You give the appearance of one widely traveled,

I’ll bet you’ve seen things in your time.

So sit down beside me and tell me your story,

If you think you’ll like yesterday’s wine.

Willie Nelson

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are more than 300,000,000 of us in the United States, 235 years after John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, William Ellery, Lewis Morris, William Hooper, Samuel Chase, Abraham Clark and 47 other founders mutually pledged to each other “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

Three hundred million of us, each with our own story; the story of who we are and who we hope to be: our family background, our history, our culture, along with our hopes, our dreams, our aspirations and our prayers for our children and for the world.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

Three hundred million Americans, each with our own story, each of us self-evidently endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

July 4, 1776 ... The birth of a new nation—our nation—conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

All of our stories intersect on that day, 235 years ago, on July 4, 1776 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania the United States of America becomes the first and only nation in the world to profess this self-evident ideal, that all men are created equal.

Today, 235 years later, the world measures the morality of a nation by the extent to which its people are free to live their own story, the extent to which its government secures to its people life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Six and a half billion stories—the stories of our species’ march towards freedom—intersect in Philadelphia on that July day in 1776.

America’s story has served as a beacon to freedom-loving people everywhere. For most of us, our story, like my story, is the story of people who braved incredible hardships to come to America, to bring their family to America, because here they could be free to live their story, to pursue their own special brand of happiness, to partake of the Blessings of Liberty that is America.

My Grandfather Stahl smuggled himself out of Latvia, coming to America as a young man. My mom’s parents brought her to America as a baby, escaping the holocaust that was to consume so many in their family. They came to America to be free to live their story, linking their story — my story — to the story of freedom and that day in July, 1776.

America’s story is not just the story of freedom. It is, as well, the story of freedom’s denial, too often demonstrating the sometimes very wide gulf between our ideals and our realities.

The founders didn’t mean all men the way we mean it today. Many owned slaves. Most of them didn’t have Native Americans or African Americans in mind when they wrote all men. Their failure to write all men and women was not an oversight; they meant men, most specifically men like them.

Much of America’s story has been the story of our struggle to extend the self-evident truths of our creed to more of us: Our Civil War, Women’s Suffrage, the Civil Rights Movement. In today’s culture wars, the left and right argue whether our self-evident truths extend to the LGBT community or the developing fetus.

“We are in the very midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world.”

John Adams

July, 1776

The revolution lives on in today’s culture wars, the story of Americans arguing with each other over whose story is to be the story of America. In today’s 24x7 telecommunication bubble, ours has become the story of everyone talking at once, all of us speaking ever-louder, trying to get our story to rise above the ever-loudening cacophony of everyone else’s story.

In this cacophony are the stories of our people, our hearts, our dreams, our fears and joys, our hopes and wishes, our sense of right and wrong, of liberty and justice. This is the voice of America that we hear in the messy discordant atonal arrhythmic dissonance that is our culture wars. It’s the voice of we the people, governing ourselves as best we can, like we’ve been doing for 235 years. Marvel at the cacophony, for it is the story of a free people. Rejoice in it. Celebrate it.

On this day of celebration, let us also remember that the story of America—the story of freedom— must be a story big enough and broad enough to encompass the stories of all who yearn to be free, for this is the meaning of our creed, our self evident truth that all of us are created equal. At the end of the day, this self-evident truth means weaving our stories together into one giant tapestry of freedom. Otherwise, our stories are not equal, our pursuit of freedom limited.

In his spirit of liberty speech at a rally in Central Park in May 1944, in the midst of World War II, Judge Learned Hand eloquently described the tapestry we weave with our stories:

"What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith.

And now in that spirit, that spirit of an America which has never been, and which may never be; nay, which never will be except as the conscience and courage of Americans create it; yet in the spirit of that America which lies hidden in some form in the aspirations of us all; in the spirit of that America for which our young men are at this moment fighting and dying; in that spirit of liberty and of America I ask you to rise and with me pledge our faith in the glorious destiny of our beloved country.”

Let us have the conscience and the courage to listen to each other’s stories.

Let Freedom Ring.

Memorial Day 2011

2011-05-29T23:53:00.000-07:00

… that these dead shall not have died in vain.

Abraham Lincoln

From the The Post and Courier, Charleston, South Carolina, May 18, 2011

North Charleston soldier killed in Afghanistan

A soldier from North Charleston — whose family said he’d been in Afghanistan for just a few of days — was killed along with four other troops Monday when a roadside bomb exploded in the southern part of the country.

The family of Army Pvt. Cheziray Pressley, 21, remembered him as a soldier dedicated to the service and as a son who loved to cut-up and make others laugh.

“He was a fun-loving young man,” said his father, Raymond Pressley on Wednesday, moments before he was to board a plane destined for Dover, Del., to await the return of his son’s body.

Cheziray Pressley, War in Afghanistan … Aaron Elandt, Iraq War … Abraham Lincoln, President … Andrew Goodman, Civil Rights Worker … Anna Campos, Spanish American War … Antonio Francisco Abad, World War II … Charles Bent, Mexican Campaign … Chief Black Kettle, Indian Wars … Clem Moser, World War I … Brandon Kirton, War in Afghanistan … David Douglas, Union Army, Civil War … Donald McIntosh, Indian Wars … Edgar Hubert, Spanish-American War … Edmund Rice, Union Army, Civil War … Emily [unknown last name], Union Army, Civil War … George Cohen, World War II … Ivan Appleby, Vietnam War … James Newell, War of 1812 … John Dzeda, World War I … Joseph Freeman, World War I … Kurt Gruber, World War II … Nathan Hale, War for Independence … James Earl Chaney, Civil Rights Worker … Jesse Farley Dyer, Mexican Campaign … John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President … Justin Pollard, Iraq … Lars Larsen, World War I … Mary Hartso, World War II … Michael Schwerner, Civil Rights Worker … Mitchell Red Cloud Jr., Korean War ... Mohammed Ali, World War II … Ramon C. Ojeda, Iraq … Reuben Smith Turman, Spanish-American War … Russell Smith, Jr, Persian Gulf War … Sitting Bull, Indian Wars … Stanley Bartusiak, Persian Gulf War … Taylor Maricle, Union Army, Civil War … Thomas H. Amos, Vietnam War … Walter Szeliga, World War II … William Dunkin, War of 1812 … Wilma Ledbetter, Korean War … Amaru Aguilar, War in Afghanistan

These men and women died for us, we the people. They died so that we could be free, so that we might live in peace. They died so that we might inherit the Blessings of Liberty, passing them forward to our children and grandchildren. Since the shot heard ‘round the world was fired in Lexington, Massachusetts on April 19, 1775, more than 1,200,000 American men and women have given their last full measure of devotion so that we might live free.

They died not just for us, but for all who yearn to be free. They died for the Egyptians in Tahrir Square and the Libyan freedom fighters in Tripoli. They died for the men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan who yearn to be free just as they died for the Israelis and Palestinians wanting to live free in peace.

Men and Women… Republicans … Democrats ... Federalists and Whigs ... Pennsylvanians … Michiganders … New Yorkers … Texans … Washingtonians … Floridians … Californians ... Right-Wing Conservatives … Left-Wing Liberals … Socialists ... Communists ... Capitalists ... Unionists ... Brits … Native Americans … French … Japanese … Chinese … Koreans ... Nigerians … Armenians … Germans … Russians … Czechs … Italians … Columbians … Mexicans … Salvadorans…Indians … Pakistanis … Egyptians … Lebanese … Syrians … Israelis … Palestinians … Whites … Blacks ... Yellows ... Reds ... Christians … Jews … Buddhists … Moslems … Catholics … Born-Agains and Atheists … Straights … Gays … Lesbians.

Freedom is a human aspiration. It knows no ethnicity, no nationality. It is colorblind. It has different sexual orientations. Its prayers to God take many forms … or no form at all.

Our hearts hunger not only for our own freedom. Our hearts hunger as well for the freedom of others. Every parent knows this. Our hearts understand that, as Martin Luther King reminded us, justice denied anywhere diminishes justice everywhere.

It is in our hearts’ deepest yearnings for freedom that we give that last full measure of devotion. It’s what lets a man throw himself on a grenade so that his unit may live. It’s what lets a woman fly a chopper into battle so she can rescue her comrades. It’s what led James Cheney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner to their deaths bringing freedom to segregated Mississippi in the summer of 1963 as freedom leads the brave men and women in North Africa, the Middle East and throughout the world who today fight for their own freedom and the freedom of others. Freedom is what led Moses back to Egypt and Jesus to the cross.

On this Memorial Day, let us bring into the present Lincoln's inspiring words from our own Civil War, from Gettysburg, 1863:

It is ... for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that all nations under God shall have their own birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall spread across the earth.

Let Freedom Ring.

Patriots Day, 2011

2011-04-20T09:37:00.000-07:00

America’s civil war began 150 years ago on April 12, 1861 when Confederate troops stationed in Charleston, South Carolina bombarded Fort Sumter, forcing its capitulation.

Six weeks earlier, the citizens of Charleston and the Union troops at Fort Sumter had each celebrated George Washington’s 129^th birthday. The citizens of Charleston fired 13 rounds in celebration, one for each of the original 13 states. The troops at Ft. Sumter fired 33 rounds, one for each of the states in the Union in 1861, including the seven states that had, like South Carolina, already seceded.

Both sides believed they were patriots. Four years later, more than 600,000 of these patriots were dead.

***********

I grew up in Oil City, Pennsylvania, a small conservative town in the mountains of western Pennsylvania where Oil Creek flows into the Alleghany River. It was in Oil City that my own patriotism took root.

My parents instilled in me—and my brother and sister—strong values of equality. We were taught the Golden Rule, that every human being was worthy of the same respect we wanted for ourselves. They taught us compassion, for there but for the grace of God, go I. And they taught us how to work together; how when we cooperate we can miraculously make 1 + 1 equal 3 and when we fail to cooperate, how 1 + 1 can equal far less than 2.

My parents—along with my grandparents, aunts and uncles—taught us that we had a responsibility to America. My mother, her parents and my Dad’s father counted themselves among the tired, poor, huddled masses who came to America yearning to breathe free. My father and Uncles had fought for freedom in World War II, saving from Hitler’s ovens a few surviving cousins and my Aunt Rosella, who came to America from Auschwitz and who will be 90 in less than two weeks. My family owes much to this country that took us in and gave us the opportunity to live free.

It was Mr. Welch, my fourth grade teacher, who connected the narrative of my family with the historical narrative that defines America’s core vision:

Mr. Welch knew well America’s historical narrative. His grandfather Col. Norman J. Maxwell, a member of the 100th Pennsylvania Volunteers, had, after Ft. Sumter, played a vital role in America’s new birth of freedom, ensuring that government of the people, by the people, for the people did not perish from the earth.

***********

The challenges America faces today are many and they are complex. Like every organization subject to economic reality, we must increase efficiency, we must become more effective, we must be better than the competition, we must invest in our future, and we must get our spending in line with our income. Add things like national defense to this already difficult mix and it’s easy to see that there are no simple solutions.

And like organizations everywhere, the best way to get the best set of solutions to our challenges is through collaboration and cooperation, taking advantage of the creativity and energy that is unleashed when we humans work together, getting 10 from 1 + 1.

And yet, we live in a period of time when we are as divided as we have been in the 150 years since Ft. Sumter.

Some of us are Republicans. Others Democrat. Some belong to the Tea Party. Others are Progressives. Some of us are liberal. Others conservative. Some believe the Bible is inerrant truth. Others view the Bible as a fairy tale. Some of us see global warming as a threat to our species. Others see it as a cynical hoax perpetrated by a cabal of internationalists. Some of us look at Planned Parenthood and see abortions. Others of us look at Planned Parenthood and see abortions avoided through improved family planning.

Two opposing sides, each morally convinced of the rightness of its cause, each seeing itself as the true Patriots.

Am I right? Are you? Where in this morass is truth to be found?

You, of course, believe that you’re right while I, of course, believe that I’m right. I, of course, accept all the evidence that ‘proves’ my side of the argument while discounting all the evidence that would support your side of the argument. You, of course, also being human, do exactly the same thing. We don’t just disagree. We even disagree on the basis by which we might come to agreement.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Abraham Lincoln

Inaugural Address, March 1861

There is a different truth, though, a deeper truth, one that brings us together rather than tears us apart: All of us are created politically equal; all of us have the right to sit at the table.

It doesn’t matter how misguided or wrong-headed I believe your beliefs are; if I believe that I have an unalienable right to be treated as your political equal, then I must treat you as my political equal. You must do the same. We all have a seat at the table.

***********

While in Washington, D.C. recently, my niece, Anya, and I went to the National Archives to see the Declaration. I told her how excited I was to be seeing it again, how meaningful its words about equality were to me.

She gave me that post-modern look, full of political skepticism, and said “Sure they wrote those words, but so what. They didn’t believe them. They were just being expedient, writing a lawyer’s brief. Many of them were slave owners, hypocrites.”

“Yes,” I replied, “That’s true. Many were slave owners. Many were hypocrites. But that isn’t the point. That’s not what matters to me.”

“To me what matters,” I said. “is that the founders had the boldness to write these words. We can have the boldness to live them.”

Let freedom ring.

Martin Luther King Day, 2011

2011-01-16T15:31:00.000-08:00

I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is once again the Winter of America’s discontent. America is angry. The same anger that was unleashed 43 years ago by the assassination of Martin Luther King has again been unleashed in the wake of the Tucson shooting.

America is heartbroken by the shootings last week in Tucson, just like we were heartbroken on that tearful April night when King was murdered. Our hope has again been shattered. And we are again angry, like we were in 1968.

We are angry over so much. So much seems not to be working. The economy sucks. We’re broke and over-spending. There aren’t enough jobs. Some people are making out extremely well while the average worker has fallen far behind. Entitlements are killing us. Our cultures are at war. And we are angry, we, the people. It doesn’t take a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowin’.

And, being angry, we seem to have reverted to back to how we were before kindergarten, before we learned what it means to be civilized. We act like selfish narcissistic four year olds. We refuse to play nice. We cheer our team on while booing our opponents, as if politics were some winner-take-all football game. The only media we follow is our side’s media. And of course, we would never talk to the other side. Why bother; they aren’t “true” Americans.

Where is that more perfect union the founders bequeathed? Where are the blessings of liberty they secured for us, their posterity?

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Do we, the people really believe the dream? I mean like “really” believe, like Peter Pan and Tinker Bell believe. Or is it just a bunch of nice sounding words on a piece of paper? It is at times of tragedy that our dreams are put to the test. This is one of those times. It’s important that we, the people keep the faith with America’s creed.

Is America’s 223 year experiment in government of the people, by the people, and for the people destined to crash-burn? On our Watch? Is America destined to be studied in the past-tense, like we study ancient Rome? Are we witnessing the end of America’s exceptionalism?

Is this to be our fate? Or can we do better?

I believe we can do better. I believe that we, the people can do a whole lot better. We, the people do not have to allow ourselves to fall victim to our heartbreak. We don’t have to fall victim to our anger. We don’t have to continue hardening our hearts to each other.

We, the people can rise above our current heartbreaks and anger. We can soften our hearts. We can listen for each other’s truths. We can accept our share of the sacrifice. And, as Dr. King reminded us, we can care for the weakest among us.

All we have to do is live the dream, live out the true meaning of our creed: all of us, created equal. That’s all of us … even the politician from the other side of the aisle and the news commentator on the other network … all of us, created equal ... each of us worthy of the same respect, understanding, compassion and community that we wish for ourselves.

Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

It’s not easy. Not now. Not after the anger that was unleashed last week in Tucson.

That’s what makes today Tinker Bell time. It is times like this, when our faith is most tested, that we have to dig down and find those places where we really believe. Do we really believe?

For if we stop believing in the dream, then we stop doing all the little things that give us a chance to make the dream come true. And the American dream will wither and grow old and die.

But when we believe in the dream, when we keep our faith that one day America will rise up and live out the true meaning of our creed, that’s when we are ready to step up and do our part to make it happen. Imagine if we, the people committed to treating each other with respect, with understanding, with compassion and with that special feeling that we are part of a shared American community. Miracles occur in the strangest of places.

Our problems won’t vanish simply because we live America’s creed. There are no silver bullets in a world as complex as ours.

But as we live America’s creed, we unleash our imagination, our creativity, our ability to work hard, our sense of community, our readiness for shared-sacrifice, our entrepreneurial spirit; all those qualities that define what is exceptional in America.

In December of 1964, Martin Luther King accepted the Nobel Peace Prize with words of faith that are as necessary today as they were 46 years ago.

I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history.

I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him.

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.

I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.

I still believe that We Shall overcome!

This faith can give us courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom.

When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds and our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born.

We miss you more than ever, Martin, as we miss those who died last week in Tucson. You are our North Star, guiding us on our journey towards peace and brotherhood, love and compassion, community and hope. You showed us how to live our creed; with love, with compassion, with courage and with an unyielding belief in liberty and justice for all.

And on this day when we celebrate the anniversary of that glorious day when the universe brought Martin Luther King to us, we commit ourselves anew to the sacred task that lies before us; to live out the true meaning of America’s creed, our creed, yours and mine, we, the people.

Let freedom ring.

© Copyright 2010. Stan Stahl, PhD. All Rights Reserved.

Thanksgiving, 2010

2010-11-25T01:00:00.000-08:00

These are the times that try men’s souls.
Thomas Paine

The skies are dark this Thanksgiving. Winter has come to much of America. Two-plus years into the deepest economic recession since the Great Depression, we, the people have become afraid, fearful for our future and our children’s place in the world. As tensions at home and abroad have mounted, we have become stuck in ideological quicksand, faction against faction, unable to work together for the common good. The Blessings of Liberty are in jeopardy.

It is a time to remember what we are thankful for.

Let’s start with my parent’s generation, that great generation of men and women, those children of the depression who defeated the enemies of freedom in World War II and created the vital alliances that kept us safe during the cold war and the dismantling of colonialism around the world. Their simple example of ordinary men and women working together, doing what needs to be done, sacrificing for us, their children and grandchildren, offers us much to be thankful for.

Not just in my parent’s generation but throughout our history, the same basic qualities show up. It was ordinary men and women, coming to the new world to escape religious intolerance in Europe, who brought us our first Thanksgiving, bringing with them their commitment to a civil body politick, perhaps the first requirement of self-government.

At a time when we, the people, are anything but a civil body politick, it’s important to reflect on the meaning of the Declaration, that all of us are created equal, endowed with inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If we truly believe that we are all created equal then how can we be anything but civil? Isn’t my failure to be civil to you prima facie evidence that I don’t really believe you are my equal, that I don’t really believe the American creed? We need to remember as well the final words of the Declaration: we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. Where is that sacred honor today?

Securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity requires that we bring our very best intellect to the challenges we face. There are no simple solutions to our challenges, no silver bullets. We are going to have to think our way through them and that requires at a minimum our ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving. That you and I can think as well as we do is a debt we owe to Socrates and Plato, Galileo and Newton, Descartes and Locke, Franklin, Jefferson and Adams, Darwin and Einstein, along with every teacher we have ever had.

It’s not enough that we think straight. It’s equally important that we be wise, that we know how to get along, that we recognize how our fates are intertwined. Liberty and justice for all is not a zero-sum game of winners and losers but a moral conviction, a faith in the miracle of cooperation where we all win together.

Thanksgiving is a time to reflect on faith, part of that legacy of religious freedom passed down from that first Thanksgiving. America is many faiths. And while they all speak differently about man’s relationship to the universe, they speak with one voice about our moral relationship to each other: love thy neighbor as thyself; that which is hateful to you, do not do to another; not one of you is a believer until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.

America—at our best—speaks with this voice of wisdom, this voice of cooperation. During the cold winter of World War II, Judge Learned Hand reflected the Golden Rule in the spirit of liberty:

No winter was colder than the winter of 1777 when the spirit of liberty was forged by those early Americans. We who are alive today can’t begin to imagine what that winter must have been like, at a time when our future was never more in doubt. Washington wrote of those brave men at Valley Forge: To see Men without Clothes to cover their nakedness, without Blankets to lay on, without Shoes, by which their Marches might be traced by the Blood from their feet ….

This is what they did for us, you and me, those early Americans at Valley Forge more than 200 years ago; they and all the other men and women who have sacrificed for us, so that you and I could be here today, beneficiaries of the Blessings of Liberty that they secured for us.

Now it’s our turn, our time to secure the Blessings of Liberty to our posterity. It is time once again to ask not what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country. This is the only thanks that truly matters this Thanksgiving: that we do for others what others have done for us. Otherwise it’s just words and, as the media continues to prove every day, talk is the cheapest of commodities.

In 1934, during the cold winter of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt described the opportunity that is America in his Thanksgiving Day Proclamation:

During the past year we have been given courage and fortitude to meet the problems which have confronted us in our national life. Our sense of social justice has deepened. We have been given vision to make new provisions for human welfare and happiness, and in a spirit of mutual helpfulness we have cooperated to translate vision into reality. More greatly have we turned our hearts and minds to things spiritual. We can truly say, "What profiteth it a nation if it gain the whole world and lose its own soul." With gratitude in our hearts for what has already been achieved, may we, with the help of God, dedicate ourselves anew to work for the betterment of mankind.

History teaches us that times of crisis are not only times of danger but also times of great opportunity. The stories of our past are like beacons, lighting our way through the dark night, shining their light on new opportunities. From them we gather the knowledge, the courage and the wisdom to do our part in passing on the Blessings of Liberty from our ancestors to our descendants.

As this year’s winter descends over America, it becomes more important than ever to hold fast to the spirit of liberty so that we may emerge from our time of crisis as earlier generations of Americans emerged from theirs, with a deeper sense of social justice, a clearer vision of human welfare and happiness, a renewed spirit of mutual helpfulness to translate vision into reality, and a strengthened commitment to work together intelligently and compassionately for the betterment of mankind.

As we give thanks this Thanksgiving, let us rededicate ourselves to the cause of freedom, to creating that shining city on the hill where all are created equal so that we may soon say “The winter of our discontent is over. Springtime has returned to America.”

Let freedom ring.

© Copyright 2010. Stan Stahl, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. This article may be reproduced and distributed only in its entirety.

Constitution Day, 2010

2010-09-19T11:13:00.000-07:00

How are we, a free people, to govern ourselves?

This was the question Washington, Madison, Franklin and their colleagues asked themselves that miraculous summer 223 years ago. Eleven years after bringing forth a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, the founders gathered again in Philadelphia to answer the primary political question: How are we, a free people, to govern ourselves?

It is a question that we, the people must again ask, less than two months before our mid-term elections.

Our systems seem to be falling apart. Over the last few months we have had to seal a hole we drilled in the floor of the Gulf of Mexico looking for oil we need because, for more than 30 years, we have lacked the political will to wean ourselves from foreign oil. In another demonstration of the increasing challenges of safely managing our food supply, as many as 76,000 people may have been sickened by eggs unnecessarily contaminated by salmonella. Our infrastructure, too, is becoming increasingly unsafe as was demonstrated recently in a San Francisco suburb when a 50 year old gas pipeline exploded, killing at least 4 people and destroying 37 homes.

In the culture wars, we have seen a conservative Christian Minister in Florida seek to exercise his First Amendment right to burn the Qur’an even as many of his flock would, I’m sure, deny to fellow citizens the right to burn the American flag. And a majority of us seem all too ready to dispense with the First Amendment when it comes to the question of the right of an Imam to build a cultural center near Ground Zero.

The poverty rate is the highest it’s been since the 1960s. Unemployment and under-employment are dangerously high. The economy isn’t growing. Global competition is increasing. Our population is aging, straining our future economic flexibility. We continue to fight an unpopular war in Afghanistan. While we may pray for peace between Israel and Palestine, we must admit that the probability of a peace agreement is not large. Iran and North Korea continue to live outside the community of peaceful nations.

Oh, and lest I forget, we’re broke, with Federal and State balance sheets destined to weaken for the foreseeable future.

David Brooks wrote recently in the New York Times: “The social fabric is fraying. Human capital is being squandered. Society is segmenting. The labor markets are ill. Wages are lagging. Inequality is increasing. The nation is overconsuming and underinnovating. China and India are surging. … Over the next decade there will have to be spending cuts and tax increases.”

These are again the times that try men’s souls.

Never under-estimate the power of we, the people.

Christine O’Donnell

Delaware Senate Nominee, Tea Party

September 14, 2010

While my political tastes lean more towards espresso than tea, the Tea Party’s momentum is just one more demonstration that Washington isn’t working. It doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.

Give it to the Tea Party. They understand that if government isn’t working, then it’s up to us, we, the people to get it working. That’s the meaning of freedom—that’s it’s our responsibility to get government working.

Which takes us right back to the question the founders asked 223 years ago: How are we, a free people, to govern ourselves?

First, it seems, we have a solemn responsibility to govern ourselves in accordance with the six objectives enumerated in the Constitution’s Preamble:

In addition to the first five objectives, the Preamble reminds us that we are here because those who came before us acted to secure the Blessings of liberty to us. In doing so, it also serves to remind us of our responsibility to act not only for ourselves but for our posterity. We govern not just to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves but to our Posterity, as well. This is something we need to teach to our children as part of our responsibility to secure for them the Blessings of Liberty.

"Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom."

Thomas Jefferson

The solutions we, the people must craft to meet our challenges require a commitment to intellectual integrity. Solutions can’t be based just on opinions or the ‘special facts’ of one or another special interest group. We have to have honest dialogue around the ‘meaning’ of these facts, the opportunities they give us for creative win-win-win solutions, and the constraints they impose on how we might best meet these challenges. There can be no room for dogma, political posturing or the hiding of ‘uncomfortable’ facts.

Given the human tendency to accept the ‘facts’ that support our own point-of-view while discounting the ‘facts’ that might suggest we’re wrong, we have a responsibility to be unbelievably fair-minded about the other side. We must learn to ‘bend over backwards’ to understand their point-of-view. This too we must teach to our children for how else are they to secure the Blessings of Liberty to themselves and their Posterity.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

Declaration of Independence

July 4, 1776

Meeting the challenges we face requires solutions that work for us all. Finding these solutions requires us to listen to each other with respect, working cooperatively to find creative solutions. One need look no farther than the Constitutional Convention to see how we have been able to work together across the widest of political gulfs, finding in the greatest of our challenges the most beautiful of solutions—just like delegates from slave states and free states were able to find compromise 223 years ago in Philadelphia.

The Declaration isn’t just a bunch of pretty words. I was raised to believe that I have a personal responsibility to treat other people in accordance with the principle that we are all created equal. Believing we are all created equal means we don’t spit on people whose political views differ from our own. It means we don’t brand people we disagree with as “stupid.” It means we don’t marginalize the other side, treating our own side as everything good and the other side as everything evil. More positively, it means we seek to open our hearts to those with whom we disagree so we may find the common ground from which the most creative solutions emerge. At its heart, our Declaration is a political restatement of the Golden Rule. This too we must teach our children so that they may govern themselves wisely.

Eleven years before the Constitution, on the 1^st of July, 1776, John Adams addressed the 2^nd Continental Congress, beseeching them to declare our independence from England. Adams’ words that fateful day ring loud and clear, down through the ages to us today: “We are in the very midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world.”

The revolution continues.

Let freedom ring.

Independence Day, 2010

2010-07-04T16:03:00.000-07:00

“We are in the very midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world.”
John Adams
July, 1776

The Fourth of July parade. Oil City, Pennsylvania. A lot of years ago. Flags flying. Trumpets blaring. Cymbals crashing. Fifes and drums playing. The High School marching band. The Oil City Downtown Business Association. Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts. Brownies and Girl Scouts. The city’s churches and its synagogue. The Rotary Club, the Elks and the Optimists. The American Legion and the VFW. Marching bands playing the songs of America – My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty. … Glory, glory hallelujah. His truth goes marching on. … Columbia the gem of the ocean. … Yankee doodle went to town. … And the caissons go marching along. … You’re a grand old flag. You’re a high flying flag. … From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli. … Hurrah for the flag of the free. May it wave as our standard forever – a grand patriotic cacophony of song opening a young boy’s heart to the meaning of America.

In declaring our independence from England’s King George, the American Revolution was, in part, political. But it wasn’t the political revolution that moved the young boy; it was the moral revolution: all men and women are created equal. Swept away in one fell swoop was the notion that any one of us is created more equal than the rest. Not King George. Not his Ministers. Not you. Not me. Not anyone.

Four score and seven years later, Abraham Lincoln was to characterize the meaning of America in the great words of the Gettysburg Address: our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

********

In today’s culture wars, it’s hard to hear the meaning of America. The angry and insistent voices of the factions that make up today’s political landscape are like all the bands marching in the Independence Day parade of my youth, each playing its own patriotic song in its own key as loudly as it can in a vain attempt to drown out the other bands; each band convinced of its right to be more equal than others.

Most of the time we listen to the bands that play the songs that appeal to some mixture of our sense of America mixed in some proportion with what is, truth be told, our own self-interest. Most of the time, we don’t listen to the bands that aren’t playing our songs; the louder they play, the more we shut our ears to them. Study after study demonstrates human behavior being what it is, we listen to the arguments that support our conclusions while ignoring those that don’t.

Today, 234 years after the start of the American Revolution, let’s not focus on the band playing our music. Today is Independence Day, time for a revolution.

Today, let’s set aside our normal human behavior for a moment and listen to the entire ensemble of bands, listen to all the factions that make up modern America all at once, all together. When we do … when we listen very quietly … we hear something wondrous. We hear the sound of freedom, just like that young boy heard during that Independence Day parade many years ago.

In our arguments over the war on terror and our Afghan policy we hear the sound of freedom.

In our arguments over energy policy and off-shore drilling we hear the sound of freedom.

In our arguments over financial reform and economic policy we hear the sound of freedom.

In our arguments over gay rights and the balance between pro-choice and pro-life we hear the sound of freedom.

In our arguments over the meaning of the Constitution, over presidential power and the rule of law we hear the sound of freedom.

And in everything else we, the people, argue about, in all of it we hear the sound of freedom. After the sound of laughing children, it is perhaps the most beautiful of sounds.

********

Today is not the day to quarrel over America’s culture wars. Today is the day to celebrate that we, the people, are free to have culture wars. Today is the day to listen to all the voices, even those with which we disagree, rejoicing in our resonant discord.

Listen to our voice, the voice of America. That’s us we’re hearing, we, the people. Listen to the music we are making. Hear our reasoned analysis and our quiet prayers, our anger and our disrespect. Hear our hearts and our dreams, our fears and our joys, our loves and our hates, our hopes for the future and our broken hearts for the past. Hear in our voices our sense of right and wrong, of liberty and justice, and our relationship to our God or whatever.

Be proud of this voice, for it is the voice of a free people, alive to the challenges of today and the promises of tomorrow. Be proud of this voice that we hear in the grand discord that is America’s culture wars. That’s our voice we hear, we, the people, governing ourselves as best we can just like we’ve been doing for 234 years. Listen and be proud, grateful to the founders for bequeathing the blessings of liberty to us and committed to bequeathing these same blessings to those generations yet unborn

********

There is a truth that emerges in the stillness, when we listen quietly to the sound of freedom, to our 234 year argument with ourselves over the meaning of our creed and how it is best reflected in our government: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The simple truth that emerges in the quiet stillness is that this is what government of the people, by the people and for the people sounds like: a messy discordant atonal arrhythmic cacophony, the voice of we, the people.

We have always been, we are now and we will always be the argument as, we, the people meet our challenges. The culture wars are the very chords and rhythms of freedom.

So tomorrow, when we go back to whichever side of the culture wars we happen to be on, let us commit to doing so with a spirit of tolerance and cooperation, a spirit that recognizes that all are created equal, so that we may continue the revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world.

Let freedom ring.

© Copyright 2010. Stan Stahl, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

Memorial Day, 2010

2010-05-26T22:35:00.000-07:00

… that these dead shall not have died in vain

Four score and seven years before Abraham Lincoln spoke these words at Gettysburg, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

America’s world was dark in 1863. Our new nation was then engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. Two years earlier, Lincoln’s inauguration, the secession of seven Southern states and the attack on Fort Sumter had split the nation. The survival of the world’s only government of the people, by the people, for the people was very much in doubt when Lincoln spoke those words.

Today America’s world is again dark. Storm clouds continue to gather.

American soldiers continue to give their last full measure of devotion in the 9th year of our war against Al Quada and its friends.

North Korea is again rattling its now nuclear-armed saber, more aggressively than it has in several years. Iran fools no one when it asserts that its atomic projects are intended only for peace.

Since the Fort Hood shooting last November, we have had two attempted terrorist attacks on the homeland. That both failed reflects the attacker’s amateur attempts, not the security of our defenses.

The world’s economy is teetering on a knife-edge. Will the people of Greece accept the reforms that Europe is insisting on? Will Greece’s problems be repeated in Portugal, Italy, or Spain? Will Europe’s problems become America’s problem? Given America’s debt and our economic circumstances, what economic sacrifices must we be prepared to accept?

As I write, oil continues to gush from a man-made hole in the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. Even as I’m confident that we will seal this hole in the Earth’s crust, there is no way I feel confident that we know what we’re doing. As one trained in mathematics and science, it seems clear to me that we are way over our head on this one. Is an accident waiting to happen an accident or willful negligence … or just plain stupidity?

And the closeness between BP and our Government that allowed the Gulf oil spill to happen … just like the closeness between Wall Street and our Government that brought on the recession in the economic meltdown of 2008 … clear signals that when it comes to the economy, ours seems no longer to be a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

The time is dark indeed. It is a time of doubt—a time for fear—as nothing seems to be working right.

A house divided against itself cannot stand
Abraham Lincoln, 1858

Yet instead of lighting candles to pierce the darkness, we yell at each other across ideological divides that seem designed to keep the light out. Like the Civil War, we, the people are once again divided, at war with ourselves.

It’s hard to say when America’s second civil war began; perhaps with the televising of the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s. But 50 years or so ago, we, the people stopped listening to one another. Instead of listening, we took positions. Are you for or against a person’s right to sell his home to whomever he pleases? Are you for or against the war in Vietnam? Are you pro-choice or pro-life? Are you for or against guns? Are you for or against government regulation? Are you for or against gay marriage? Are you for or against the GM bail-out? And the list goes on.

Good questions, all of them; the kinds of questions that take us right to our basic moral principles, particularly as they shape our conception of the meaning of America. And sound moralist that Americans are, we’ve spent the last 50 years or so trying to make everyone in America believe in our vision of the right answers to these questions.

Over the years, meaningful dialogue has given way to yelling at each other, like the spoiled 2-year olds we seem to have become. And our politicians fall all over themselves becoming who they think we want them to be.

The dysfunctional American family: it might be taken as black comedy … if the consequences weren’t so serious.

But the consequences are serious, extremely serious. Take a look at the above list of challenges. Now add all the things I haven’t even listed. By talking past each other instead of listening to each other, we, the people have put America at risk. These are once again the times that try men’s souls.

And let’s get real. When was the last time your mind was changed by someone screaming obscenities at you? No one is going to change anyone else's opinion by yelling, screaming, spitting, cursing or holding up an obscene poster. Anger only breeds more anger. It doesn’t solve problems.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
Rumi 1207-1273

We are not going to solve the myriad challenges that beset us unless and until we open up our minds, open up our hearts and start listening to each other.

It is time for a New American Patriotism, a patriotism defined by our willingness to work together, to cooperate, focusing on what draws us together and what we need to do, not on what divides us. Let us meet on that field of Patriotism out beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing, free men and women, conceived in liberty, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, and committed to working together in the best tradition of America to meet the challenges of our time, just as earlier generations of Americans met the challenges of theirs.

My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you—
ask what you can do for your country.
President John F. Kennedy, 1961

This is what we can do for America. We can find opportunities to cooperate, to lower our voices and begin again the long journey of America to that more perfect Union, to that City on the hill. This is what America needs from us at this moment in our history. This is how we best honor the sacrifice of those who gave their last full measure of devotion so that we may be free.

We owe this New American Patriotism to our posterity as well, for it is our responsibility—our generation of Americans—to bequeath the blessings of liberty to our posterity just as earlier generations have bequeathed them to us.

So let us take this occasion of Memorial Day to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—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.

Let Freedom Ring.

Copyright © 2010. Stan Stahl, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

Martin Luther King Day, 2010

2010-01-18T13:02:00.000-08:00

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability,
but comes through continuous struggle.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

I remember when I discovered my own racism. It was in a small town in northeastern Ohio, six months after my ex-wife and I adopted our son, Jonathan.

Adopting Jonathan—an African-American—was an act of faith in America, in the dream that “one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”

Three and a half years before we adopted Jonathan, Cathy and I had sat together, tears streaming down our faces, when we heard the news that Martin Luther King had been shot in Memphis. Our hearts might have been broken that night, but we kept the faith that our child, like Martin Luther King’s own four children would “one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

And here I was in this small town in Ohio, the white father of a 9-month old African-American baby, becoming aware of my own racism. These are the important moments, when we come up against who we are.

What I saw that day was indeed racism; the racism that is buried deep in the American psyche. But it was so much more than just Black-White and White-Black racism that I saw that day. The racism I saw is only the tip of an iceberg. Beneath the water, what I saw is a fundamental element of our common human character.

Racism exists to separate us, one from another. 50,000 years ago, after we left our African homeland, our hunter-gatherer ancestors would periodically “bump into each other.” The result was often war, often resulting in the enslavement or annihilation of one side or the other. In those days it was necessary to feel stone cold hatred for your enemy, for how else could you kill him. And if you did not kill him, it would be you who would die.

In the battle to secure their own survival, our ancestors had to learn to hate those who were different from us. Racism has been in every culture ever since. Humans can no more escape the racism in our cultures than we can escape the carcinogens in the air we breathe.

King understood just how deeply racism is buried in the human soul. He reminded us that the end to racism would not come on wheels of inevitability, but would come only through continuous struggle.

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

King also understood that there was something else in our souls, something buried every bit as deep as our collective racism, a weapon powerful enough to defeat racism.

Surviving against our enemies 50,000 years ago not only required you to hate your enemy; survival also required that you love your own tribe every bit as much as you hated your enemy. It was not your survival after all that mattered; what mattered was the survival of your tribe. Others might sacrifice their life for you; you must be prepared to do the same for them. From this was born the Golden Rule, the one moral rule found in every religion on this Earth.

If fear and hatred of each other is our species’ original sin, then the Golden Rule is our salvation.

King recognized—perhaps more clearly than anyone before him—how deeply the Golden Rule is embedded in America’s creed ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’

By holding a mirror to the ideals of America, King forced America to confront the question who do we mean by all men? Was all men to include all men or were there to continue to be two classes of Americans, one created more equal than the other? Just who is to be allowed to pursue the American Dream? Just who is our neighbor that we are commanded to love? Blacks? Women? Gays and Lesbians? The result is not inevitable. The struggle continues. The dream endures.

This is not just America’s struggle, America’s dream. This struggle, this dream, belongs to the world. As the world grows smaller, as we get to know each other, our 50,000 year old fear and hatred of others is bumping up against 50,000 years of the Golden Rule.

We see the tragic consequences when fear and hatred win out over the Golden Rule in places like the Middle East, Iran, North Korea, Darfur, Zimbabwe, and Myanmar. The terrorists bent on destroying our way of life know only how to hate; they have not learned to love.

But we also see the glorious results when the peoples of free nations live in accordance with the Golden Rule, for what is government of the people, by the people and for the people but the Golden Rule applied to political power. The Blessings of Liberty are nothing but the logical outcome of the Golden Rule, just as the current recession is the inevitable outcome when avarice and greed come to trump the Golden Rule.

In December of 1964, Martin Luther King accepted the Nobel Peace Prize with words of faith that are as necessary today as they were 45 years ago.

I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind.

I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history.

I refuse to accept the idea that the "-isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him.

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.

I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow.

I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.

I still believe that We Shall Overcome!

This faith can give us courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom.

When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds and our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born.

We miss you more than ever, Martin. America and the world need you more than ever. Even as the tears continue to roll down our cheeks, we keep faith with your memory. For your faith, Martin, is our North Star.

Let freedom ring.

Copyright © 2010. Stan Stahl, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

Thanksgiving, 2009

2009-11-26T00:01:00.000-08:00

It has been eight years since we observed Thanksgiving in the dark shadow of 9/11, eight years since I wrote the first of these Freedom Essays expressing my deepest gratitude to those who bequeathed to us the blessings of liberty, the giants on whose shoulders we all stand.

My fourth grade teacher, Mr. Welch, taught us how the Pilgrims came to America to escape religious persecution and that Thanksgiving was a time to celebrate our religious freedoms. He made sure we learned the Mayflower Compact with its commitment to that civil body politic. And he taught us of the sacrifices of that first winter when more than half the colony perished.

These were the great themes I was taught of America, the great themes that Mr. Welch taught us in that western Pennsylvania schoolhouse so many years ago.

Freedom. The freedom to worship as we please, to believe what we want, no matter how dangerous or unpopular it might be. As Emerson, wrote “nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

Cooperation. The commitment we freely make to one another to cooperate together for the greater good in a civil body politic. The recognition of what we have seen throughout our history, that with cooperation 1 + 1 miraculously makes 3.

Shared Sacrifice. The recognition throughout our history that—just like that brutal winter of 1620—like Valley Forge—like the beaches of Normandy—and like that dark day in September eight years ago—we are in this together, that our fates are connected, that, as Benjamin Franklin put it “We must hang together, gentlemen ... else, we shall most assuredly hang separately.”

On that Thanksgiving Day eight years ago, the Thanksgiving after 9/11, America was united as one people. Our freedoms had been attacked by a terrorist enemy committed to our destruction. The sacrifice of 9/11 was shared throughout the country as everyone knew someone who knew someone who died that horrific day. And a spirit of cooperation existed in America like we had not seen since the Second World War. Not just in America, but throughout most of the world.

How different it is today. There is too little cooperation in the halls of Government, far less than we need to deal with the challenges we face. With the money wells gushing again on Wall Street while the spigots are still turned off on Main Street, the people are angry. Where is the shared-sacrifice, the sense that we are all in this together? In the absence of cooperation and in the presence of anger, our freedoms are inexorably slipping away. 1 + 1 is fast becoming ½.

I don’t think this is what we want, we the people. Nor is it keeping with our responsibilities. As I remember learning in Mr. Welch’s classroom, it is our responsibility, we the people … our solemn duty … to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity just as those who came before us secured these blessings for us.

*************************

One of the first things a good hockey coach will do when things aren’t going right is to get back to basics; get his players’ focus back on the fundamentals of the game. Do the little things right and the big things will follow.

We, the people, need to do the same thing. We need to focus on the fundamentals: freedom, cooperation and shared sacrifice. Get these right and we unleash the most imaginative, innovative and productive force the world has ever seen. Get it wrong and 1 + 1 quickly becomes ½.

This week’s news brought a story that illustrates in one small way what it means to get it right. Liberal organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union are teaming up with conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation to sue the Government on what they see as over-criminalization. Opposite ends of the political spectrum joining up to protect our freedoms.

Contrast this with the country’s dominant personalities. Perhaps the only thing Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann would agree on is how each is good for the other’s ratings. Limbaugh, Olbermann, Palin, Pelosi, Reid, McConnell—everyone wants to define us by our labels: right, left, conservative, liberal, hawk, dove, gay, straight, etc etc etc. Their success too often lies in defining us by how we’re different from each other. Divide and conquer. The problem with this is that, at its best, it is win-lose; at its worst it is lose-lose. Except of course for big-money which is all too happy to take advantage of the situation for their own selfish ends; they’re the big winners while we, the people, are the big losers.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Heritage Foundation have gone back to the basics. Forget the labels, they’re saying. Focus on the fundamentals. It’s their shared belief that over-criminalization constitutes tyranny by the state and they are cooperating to take these freedoms back. The American Civil Liberties Union wins. The Heritage Foundation wins. And so do we, the people; we win. Win-Win-Win.

Be the change you want to see in the world.
Mahatma Gandhi

Thanksgiving is a time to reflect on our faith, part of that legacy of religious freedom passed down from that first Thanksgiving. America is many faiths. And while they all speak differently about man’s relationship to the universe, they speak with one voice about our moral relationship to each other: love they neighbor as thyself; that which is hateful to you, do not do to another; not one of you is a believer until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself. Why? Because the Golden Rule points the way to win-win-win.

America—at our best—speaks with this very same voice, the voice of win-win-win. During the time of great shared sacrifice that was World War II, Judge Learned Hand had the honor of addressing many thousands of Americans—including a large number of new citizens—at an I Am an American Day ceremony in Central Park. His words that day reflect the Golden Rule, the voice of win-win-win:

I am most grateful this Thanksgiving for the spirit of liberty for it is the wellspring for all that is good in America. It is America’s spiritual foundation—it honors freedom, it engenders cooperation and it reflects, not only America’s 400 years of shared sacrifice, but the shared sacrifices of freedom-seeking people throughout perhaps 2 million years of human history.

Back to fundamentals. It is the spirit of liberty that can reenergize America and unleash American imagination, innovation and productivity. It is the spirit of liberty that can turn win-lose and lose-lose into win-win-win. It is the spirit of liberty that can make 1 + 1 again equal 3. It is the spirit of liberty that can lead us to that shining city on the hill.

May this be a joyful Thanksgiving for you and your loved ones. And may it signal a renewed commitment in us all to manifest the spirit of liberty in everything we do.

Let freedom ring.

© Copyright 2009. Stan Stahl, Ph.D.. All Rights Reserved. This article may be reproduced and distributed provided it is done so in its entirety.

Constitution Day, 2009

2009-09-17T00:01:00.000-07:00

You lie.

Joe Wilson
Congressman, South Carolina

The debate over health-care reform in America is being dominated by two extreme political factions. Ideologues on the far left threaten to torpedo any bill that fails to have a public insurance option. Ideologues on the far right are doing what they can to torpedo the entire process.

During the debates over the ratification of the Constitution in 1787–88, James Madison had observed that liberty is to faction what air is to fire. If we are to have liberty, then we will inevitably have factions.

The … causes of faction are … sown in the nature of man … A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points … have divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.

The Federalist No. 10
James Madison

Factions have been with us since America’s founding. And as Madison so wisely observed they are too often much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.

And so it is today in the debate over health care.

Based on available evidence, it’s quite possible that proactively encouraging honest dialogue about death, both with the dying and with members of their family, might result in a better quality of life for the dying while also saving 10% of Medicare costs. But we may never know; not after Sarah Palin raised the specter of “death squads.”

And it’s likely that a well-conceived system of cooperative insurance exchanges could exceed any government-managed public insurance option. But we may never know; too many on the far-left are ideologically opposed to the concept.

It’s even likely that letting illegal immigrants — who tend to be younger and healthier than the average American — buy into the pool of insured would lower everyone else’s cost of health care. But Joe Wilson made sure that this option would never see the light of day.

So while factions are as American as Motherhood and Apple Pie, here we are, we, the people, seemingly paralyzed by factions. And while one can often make the case that government paralysis might be a good thing, this is not one of these times; not with the aging of America and the increasing proportion of our national wealth being consumed by ever-rising healthcare costs.

America loses when factions become ideologically frozen, when they paralyze the nation, when they become disrespectful, when they become more interested in the other side losing than in America winning. America loses when factions become much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.

And right now, at this moment in our history, America is losing.

People are born soft and supple;
dead, they are stiff and hard.
Plants are born tender and pliant;
dead, they are brittle and dry.
Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death.
Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life.
The hard and stiff will be broken.
The soft and supple will prevail.

Lao-tzu
Tao Te Ching

This is the good news. In their ideological inflexibility, their intolerance, their disrespect for one another and for the rest of us, the old American factions of the far-left and the far-right have become hard and stiff, brittle and dry. They have become disciples of death.

The right takes delight in the fall of ACORN, brought to its knees by the seeming absence of a secular moral compass. The left takes delight in the fall of South Carolina’s governor, brought to his knees by his seeming disregard of his own self-professed Christian moral compass. Caught up in the paroxysm of their own death, they bring each other down. Greed, stupidity and hypocrisy seem to be the order of the day.

What are we, the people, to do? Are we to allow ourselves to be taken down – frozen into bad decisions – by these dying political factions?

Or will we, the people, seize the moment and create a new American faction, one capable not just of curing America’s sick health care system but, more generally, of providing the pragmatic leadership required to meet the other monumental challenges America — and the world — faces in the 21st century?

Perhaps pragmatic leadership is being born right now in the Senate Finance Committee. Perhaps it still exists in the bipartisan Senators — the Gang of 14 — who stood together in 2005 against the tyranny of the ideologues in their own parties. Perhaps, President Obama will be successful in his attempt at pragmatic leadership.

However it happens though, my reading of history — coupled with my faith in the vision of the founders — is that this new pragmatic American faction is already emerging.

— a new American pragmatism that understands that the most important job is to intelligently get the job done

— a new American pragmatism conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal

— a new American pragmatism committed to liberty and justice for all

— a new American pragmatism able to rejoice in the rambunctious give and take of faction, seeing in it the playing out of liberty; able to smile at Joe Wilson’s perhaps over-enthusiastic outburst the way one would treat an inadvertent belch from a friend— rather than seeking to rebuke him for it

— a new American pragmatism that embodies Lincoln’s simple wisdom about getting along: If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which is the high road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause be a just one.

— a new American pragmatism that also embodies Learned Hand’s Spirit of Liberty: that spirit which is not too sure that it is right; which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; which weighs the interests of others alongside its own without bias; and that remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded.

— a new American pragmatism committed to co-operate for the common good, treating everyone — friend and foe alike — by the Golden Rule, recognizing that this simple 2,500 year-old homily is the true source of the blessings of liberty.

Let freedom ring.

© Copyright 2009. Stan Stahl, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

Independence Day, 2009

2009-07-04T00:00:00.000-07:00

Great oaks from tiny acorns grow.

In most of the world the sun rose on the morning of July 4, 1776 much as it had risen the day before and much as it would rise the day after. But not in Philadelphia. And not for Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, and the 52 other founders who that day were destined to change the world.

The colonists stood alone among the nations of the world on that auspicious day 233 years ago. Political philosophers might have begun writing about the rights of man, but the King was secure in the knowledge that he ruled by divine right and, with both God and the army on his side, he would defeat these bloody insurrectionists, these traitors to the Crown … these traitors to His Crown.

And he nearly did defeat us. For it is one thing to assert rights, yet quite another to attain them.

While it would take us five years until we won our independence, we earned it at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-78. A short 18 miles from Independence Hall, a mere four hours by horse from the place where Congress had asserted our equality, it was at Valley Forge that we looked into the depths of a frozen Hell, a cold brutality that bore witness to the hard sacrifices that were to prove necessary if ideals were to be turned into reality.

To see Men without Clothes to cover their nakedness, without Blankets to lay on, without Shoes, by which their Marches might be traced by the Blood from their feet is a mark of Patience and obedience which in my opinion can scarce be parallel’d.

… it will not be believed that such a force as Great Britain has employed … could be baffled . . . by numbers infinitely less, composed of Men oftentimes half starved; always in Rags, without pay, and experiencing, at times, every species of distress which human nature is capable of undergoing.

General George Washington

At Valley Forge, in the cold winter of our birth, we stood up tall and the American character emerged. At Valley Forge, our charge became not just a revolution for independence but a revolution for nationhood … a nation of free men … an experiment in self-government … our experiment. A tiny acorn had taken root and the world was forever changed.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

One by one, they began to be abolished, these governments that were not of the people, by the people and for the people. First to fall was France where, 13 years after our own revolution, the divine rights of the King were swept away in the orgy of blood that was the French Revolution. That mankind has rights—a moral principle conceived in England in the work of Hobbes, Locke and the other political philosophers, a moral principle given birth in the American Revolution—this truth which we hold to be self-evident had gone back across the Atlantic to France and taken root in Europe.

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.
Martin Luther King

It was several months after that fateful July day that a ship arrived in England, and Europe began to learn what the founders had done in Philadelphia. News travelled slowly and most of the world took little note of our Declaration of Independence.

How the world has changed. Today, 233 years after the revolution, news finds its way across the globe showing up almost instantaneously in virtual places like Twitter and Facebook and YouTube. And today, 233 years later, with a Universal Declaration of Human Rights embodied in the United Nations, the world takes notice.

The Iranian government may have crushed opposition to its fraudulent election results but the truth got out and the world took notice. And the flame of freedom still burns.

Its own Army may have staged an illegal coup against Honduras’ elected President but the truth got out and the world took notice. And the flame of freedom still burns.

North Korea, Myanmar, Zimbabwe and the other tyrannies that still live on this planet, they are a dying breed, doomed to extinction. They cannot snuff out the flame of freedom that burns in the hearts of their people; a flame that is kept burning by freedom-loving people everywhere. Dictators can no longer keep the truth from their people and the world, and they can’t keep our hearts from connecting. In the internet age, the censor loses ... the people win.

We cannot expect that freedom will come easily to the parts of the world where it has not yet spread. Power rarely just goes away. Just as at Valley Forge, we must be prepared for the sacrifices that may lie ahead. But make no mistake about it, freedom shall prevail.

In the 233 years since that wonderful day in Philadelphia, this truth which we hold to be self-evident –that all men are created equal—has spread across the planet. That it sprouted first in 1776 in Philadelphia is perhaps an accident of history; a truth this deep was bound to germinate somewhere at some time.

But that it did sprout first on this day 233 years ago … July 4, 1776 … in Philadelphia and that we, the people, have lived it as our defining creed ever since—in this, we, the people, can all take great pride

And in our pride, let us rededicate ourselves to living its meaning—treating every one we meet—friend and foe alike—from that place in our heart where lives this self-evident truth—that all men are created equal—so that by our actions we may secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, [let us] mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

Happy Birthday America.

Let freedom ring.

© Copyright 2009. Stan Stahl, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

Memorial Day, 2009

2009-05-25T00:00:00.000-07:00

On the 19th of April in 1775, on the Village Green in Lexington, Massachusetts, John Brown, Samuel Hadley, Caleb Harrington, Jonathon Harrington, Robert Munroe, Isaac Muzzey, Asahel Porter and Jonas Parker became the first Americans to give their last full measure of devotion to the cause of liberty and to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Last week, David Schaefer, Jr, Esau De la Pena-Hernandez, Carlie Lee, III, and Roslyn Schulte died on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan in the defense of liberty and to the proposition that all men are created equal.

It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press.
It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us the freedom of speech.
It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who gives us the freedom to demonstrate.
It is the soldier who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag.

Rev. Dennis Edward O'Brien
US Marine Corps, World War II

Freedom is never free. More than 1,000,000 American men and women from Lexington to Afghanistan have given their last full measure of devotion so you and I could be free. We owe them a part of our lives, just as if they had thrown themselves on a grenade for us. For in a sense they did.

We have a responsibility, you and me, we, the people. We must earn their sacrifice.

As Lincoln reminded us at Gettysburg,

It is for us the living, to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us.

We, the people, are tied together by a shared commitment to this great task, a commitment conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

We, the people, were conceived at Lexington and Concord, and born on the Fourth of July. We almost died in infancy at Valley Forge, but we survived, giving the world not just the gift of liberty but a new form of government.

In the fratricide of our Civil War came our greatest test, whether we, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We met that test as we have met every test that the Universe has thrown at us.

We extended the vote to women. We defeated fascism and communism. We ended segregation.

And we have seen the flower of liberty blossom throughout the world, wherever men and women yearn to be free.

But the task is far from over.

The news today brought word that North Korea exploded their second nuclear weapon. Intelligence estimates are that Iran is perhaps only 18 months away from building its own nuclear weapons. There are questions about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Our brave men and women in uniform continue in harm’s way in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, contrary to what a lot of arm-chair quarterbacks might think, there are no easy answers.

Here at home, as well, the list of challenges is long and answers are not easy; the economy, our educational system and health care to name just three.

It is much easier to pull down a government …
than to build up, at such a season as the present
John Adams, 1787

There were no easy answers in 1787 either when the thirteen states sent George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and 51 other delegates to Philadelphia to participate in a convention to revise the Articles of Confederation. There was general agreement that the Articles were not working. But there were grave cultural differences between the states— slavery for one — working to prevent compromise.

A clash of doctrines is not a disaster—it is an opportunity.
Alfred North Whitehead

The need to compromise, to find common ground, was strong in 1787. And when strong needs meet strong challenges, miracles occur. We—you and me—are the beneficiaries of the miracle that was Philadelphia in 1787.

The story is told of Benjamin Franklin, that he was walking one evening in Philadelphia after the Constitutional Convention when a woman asked him “Mr. Franklin. I understand you have given us a new Government. Pray tell what form it is.” Franklin replied “A Republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

This is our challenge, this Memorial Day. This is the great task to which we, the people, must dedicate ourselves. To us falls the privilege of continuing to form that more perfect union, that shining city on the hill. To us falls the privilege of continuing to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare.

To us falls the opportunity to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

To us falls the opportunity to create the next American miracle.

Let us seize the day.

Let Freedom Ring.

Copyright © 2009. Stan Stahl, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

Patriots' Day, 2009

2009-04-19T00:01:00.000-07:00

“Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere”

As the sun was rising on the morning of April 19, 1775, 700 British soldiers met up with 77 Massachusetts minutemen on the village green in Lexington. The British had come from Boston on a secret mission to seize munitions stored by the minutemen at nearby Concord. The minutemen were waiting, having been warned by Paul Revere and other American Patriots. The shot heard ‘round the world was fired. America’s war for independence had begun. And now, 234 years later, the spirit of liberty that was born that day continues to shine on us — you and me and the people we love — their descendants.

America’s story — the story of liberty — almost ended as it was getting started.

In April, 1775 there was no United States. There were 13 separate British colonies, each with its own history, its own economic structure, its own ties back to Britain and Europe, and its own culture. Six states believed God had given them the right to own slaves; Seven states believed otherwise.

When the Colonies began meeting as the 2nd Continental Congress, in Philadelphia in May, 1775, three weeks after Lexington, they debated about what to do. Some wanted war with England. Others sought to beseech the King one last time. They disagreed, they argued but they kept talking and in doing so they put into motion the forces that were to lead to independence eight years later.

In mid-June the 2nd Continental Congress made the first of two brilliant compromises. In creating the Continental Army to protect the colonies they balanced off the competing interests of North and South. The army consisted entirely of the militia in Massachusetts — where defense was most needed — while a Virginian — George Washington — was put at its head.

Having created the Continental Army in support of those wanting to take a more militant stand towards England, the Continental Congress next sent King George the Olive Branch Petition as a final attempt at reconciliation. The petition, the second compromise, balanced off those wanting independence from England with those wanting to try for peace.

We must hang together...else, we shall most assuredly hang separately.
Benjamin Franklin

The first American Revolution succeeded because America’s founders understood that different as they were, the cause of freedom demanded that they find ways to cooperate, that they work together and find the hard compromises that cooperation requires. To them it was simple: cooperate as a free people or be tyrannized by the King. America was founded in the crucible of cooperation.

These are the times that try men’s soul.
Thomas Paine

Fast forward 234 years. We, the people, seem to have gotten ourselves into something of a pickle. Nobody seems to be quite sure what we stepped in, but it sure is messy. The earth is warming up. The Middle East is hot. The economy has turned cold. And Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Kim Il Jung need to understand that it will be a cold day in hell before the world allows them to terrorize us with nuclear weapons.

And while we’re struggling with these global problems, we have to solve our own growing health care challenges, strengthen our economy, finally get serious about energy independence, and find new ways for our children to get the world class education that a world-class economic power needs for tomorrow’s work force, not to mention doing all of this while confronting the largest budget deficits in our history.

Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste.
Rahm Emanuel

The early Patriot’s understood one of the most important duties freedom imposes: if you want to live free, you must cooperate, you must compromise.

If our generation is to succeed in bequeathing the blessings of liberty to our posterity, it will be because we have learned again to cooperate, just like the early Patriots: to seek opportunities to cooperate here in the United States and in our relationships around the globe.

This is our opportunity, our chance to make the most of this crisis.

Abraham Lincoln, taking office at the very moment when America’s commitment to cooperation had fallen apart, understood that the path to cooperation is friendship.

If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which is the high road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause be a just one.

I was delighted when the front page of yesterday’s newspaper showed a smiling President Obama shaking hands with a smiling President Chávez of Venezuela at this weekend’s Summit of the Americas. Obama’s words to the summit — “I didn’t come here to debate the past. I came here to deal with the future.” — reflect the same American pragmatism that allowed the original Patriots to set aside their differences and work together for the common cause of freedom.

It is easy to dictate to others how they should live. It is even easier to sit on the sidelines and oppose. The hard work lies in living the commitment to cooperate. This is what the Patriots did throughout our war of independence. This is the legacy they have left us. The blessings of liberty flow from cooperation.

Change will not happen overnight and it will not be easy. North Korea and Iran’s most recent actions continue to demonstrate just how hard the path of cooperation, the path of peace, will be. As we pursue the path of cooperation, we must follow President’s Reagan’s sound advice: Trust. But Verify. We cannot be naïve. But we must also follow Lao Tzu who taught us 2500 years ago that the longest journey begins with a single step.

It takes great faith to seek cooperation. Our faith in freedom, in the blessings of liberty, must be every bit as strong as the faith of those early Patriots, 234 years ago.

But we have every reason to believe our faith is warranted. For as Lincoln might have said: “Our cause is just. If we are their sincere friends, then we will have little trouble finding opportunities to cooperate.”

Let Freedom Ring.

Copyright © 2009. Stan Stahl, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

Martin Luther King Day, 2009

2009-01-19T00:00:00.000-08:00

“To every thing there is a season.”
Ecclesiastes

We are in the season of war. American men and women are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have enemies in a nuclear North Korea and perhaps soon-to-be nuclear Iran. Al Qaeda remains active. Israel and Hamas are again at war. Arch enemies India and Pakistan are as close to war as they have ever been. Russia is no friend, neither are Syria and Venezuela. Cuba remains our enemy even after nearly 50 years. So much of the world is not at peace: Darfur, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, the list goes on. The night is dark and seems to be getting darker.

In December of 1964, Martin Luther King accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to make the words of the Declaration — that ALL men are created equal — ring true in America. It was a time, as King said, “when 22 million Negroes of the United States of America are engaged in a creative battle to end the long night of racial injustice.”

“I am mindful that only yesterday in Birmingham, Alabama, our children, crying out for brotherhood, were answered with fire hoses, snarling dogs and even death. I am mindful that only yesterday in Philadelphia, Mississippi, young people seeking to secure the right to vote were brutalized and murdered. And only yesterday more than 40 houses of worship in the State of Mississippi alone were bombed or burned because they offered a sanctuary to those who would not accept segregation. I am mindful that debilitating and grinding poverty afflicts my people and chains them to the lowest rung of the economic ladder.”

The night was dark then, forty four years ago, but it was also full of hope as King accepted the Nobel Peace Prize “on behalf of all men who love peace and brotherhood.”

The night grew darker four years later. King had been murdered. Our cities were in flames. Bobby Kennedy shot, like his brother, the President. We, the people, divided, deeply divided, over a war in Vietnam. Then Kent State. The night was very dark.

The last eight years have added to the darkness. As it was for so many, 9/11 was the darkest day of my life since those dark times forty years ago. It is, indeed, the season of war.

For myself I am an optimist.
It does not seem to be much use being anything else.
Winston Churchill

While this may be the season of war, it is also the season of great optimism. On Tuesday, the day after we celebrate the memory of Martin Luther King, we, the people, will inaugurate our 44th President, a man who carries the legacy of Martin Luther King just as he demonstrates the truth of King’s faith in America.

In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, King spoke of his faith.

I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind.

I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history.

I refuse to accept the idea that the "-isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him.

I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsom and jetsom in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him.

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction.

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.

I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow.

I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men.

I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.

I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up.

I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land. "And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid."

I still believe that We Shall Overcome!

This faith can give us courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom.

When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds and our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born.

King’s faith is our faith, we, the people. It is a faith born out of our religious traditions, our shared experiences, our sacrifices and our successes. It is a faith that lives strong in our hearts — infused by our creed that all men are created equal and reflected in our responsibility, we, the people, to form that more perfect union, to establish justice, to secure the blessings of liberty to us and our posterity. It is a faith that knows no color, a faith that knows no gender or sexual preference, a faith that resides in red states and blue, for King’s faith is the faith of America.

This faith — the faith of and in a free people — has brought us from the despair of King’s murder to the mountaintop of Obama’s election.

And this is the faith that can light our path out of the season of war into the season of peace, the faith that can illuminate our imagination, infuse our creativity and transform the world.

President Kennedy said in a speech in 1962 “...we must think and act not only for the moment but for our time. I am reminded of the story of the great French Marshal Lyautey, who once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow-growing and would not reach maturity for a hundred years. The Marshal replied, 'In that case, there is no time to lose, plant it this afternoon.’”

So it is with us. The road to peace will be long. But the need is great and our faith is strong. The time to act is now.

Let Freedom Ring.

Copyright © 2009. Stan Stahl, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

Holiday Season, 2008

2008-12-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

Peace on Earth.
Good will towards all.

Nice words— Peace on Earth. Good will towards all. It makes us feel good when we say them, as if they were magical incantations through which we could transform the world into the peaceful place that we yearn for in our hearts.

And then the real world intrudes. War in Iraq and Afghanistan. Genocide in Darfur. Massacre in Mumbai. Israel and Hamas at each other’s throats. A nuclear North Korea. The threat of a nuclear Iran.

And economically, as well. What peace is there for the millions who have lost their jobs … or their homes? What peace is there for the victims of fraud and deceit? Or those in retirement seeing their pensions disappear? What peace can there be for any of us, fearful that we are on the slope of the greatest recession in four generations?

These are the times that try men’s souls.
Thomas Paine

As we look back on 2008, we see far too little peace on Earth and far too little peace in our hearts.

When we look back on 2008, we see too much failure.

Our political institutions have failed us. The tragedy that was Katrina can be seen in retrospect as an early warning signal of failures still to come. The Government agencies that should have seen the economic downturn coming didn’t. SEC investigations that in hindsight seem obvious never materialized.

Our business leaders, too, have failed us. One need only look at the Presidents of GM, Ford & Chrysler flying to Washington in their separate private corporate jets to ask Congress for a loan ... or the fall of Lehman Brothers, or Merrill, or the bailout of AIG and untold hundreds of banks.

Even our very understanding of the way the economy works has failed us. Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan admitted as much when he told Congress: “[I found a] flaw in the model that I perceived … defines how the world works.” This was not an obscure flaw like one might find in a near-perfect diamond, a flaw requiring a magnifying glass to see. Greenspan’s flaw — a failure to properly account for human greed — poisoned his entire model, just like a drop of cyanide poisons an entire glass of water.

In 2008, we learned that Wall Street’s Gordon Gecko had been wrong when he told us that greed is good. In 2008, we learned that greed is not good. In 2008, the house of cards began to fall, as We, the People, having raised greed to the level of motherhood and apple pie, finally began to reap what we had sown. Subprime mortgages. Bernard Madoff. This was the year our chickens came home to roost.

And like every year, 2008 ends with plenty of hate still in the world.

Thomas Paine had it right: these are the times that try men’s souls. These are times of chaos, times of danger, a time of fear. Peace on Earth seems very far away.

But we know that night is darkest just before dawn. And We, the People, have it in our power to cause the sun to shine. Thomas Paine knew that too.

We have it in our power to begin the world anew.
Thomas Paine

John Kennedy felt it profound that the Chinese characters making up the word chaos are the two characters: danger and opportunity.

The world may be more dangerous than it has ever been in human history. But then, the opportunity to transform the world — to make of it our dreams — has never been greater.

We are already seeing a massive economic stimulus to correct the fall of the economy. The President-Elect’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, counsels us not to waste the opportunity that the recession offers.

But our opportunity is not just economic. We have a second great opportunity, one that will pay even greater dividends than fixing our economy. And cost a lot less.

The greatest loss we suffered in 2008 was not our economic loss. It was our loss of trust. We lost trust in our institutions. We lost trust in our economic models. And — most of all — we lost trust in each other.

The American spirit was hurt in 2008. And it needs to heal, not just for the hurts of 2008, but for the hurts of Katrina. And 9/11. And the myriad of other hurts that We, the People have suffered, some going back to the split of the 1960s, others that go all the way back to America’s founding, some hurts that others did to us, other hurts that we inflicted on each other.

To every thing there is a season
and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

So let us make 2009 a time for our hearts to heal, a time to witness a rebirth of trust, a time to once again work together — to revitalize the Spirit of Liberty — for the common good.

My beliefs are probably the antithesis of evangelical Pastor Rick Warren’s. I doubt that we see eye to eye on much. But, even as we disagree on so much, I deeply appreciate his wisdom when he said “You don’t have to see eye to eye to walk hand in hand. Just because we disagree doesn’t mean we have to be disagreeable.” On this Rick Warren and I see eye to eye.

This is the road to peace. Peace in our hearts and peace around the globe.

Let this be the road We, the People, travel in 2009. The road where the Spirit of Liberty thrives. The road where the dream — all of us created equal — endures. The road where lives Lincoln’s truth that we are not enemies, but friends. The road on which trust begets trust. The road that leads to that shining city on the hill.

And let us not just walk haltingly down this road in 2009. Let us seize our opportunity and make 2009 another giant leap for mankind.

Let Freedom Ring.

© Copyright 2008. Stan Stahl, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

Thanksgiving, 2008

2008-11-27T00:00:00.000-08:00

Deep in my heart,
I do believe,
That we shall overcome some day

We Shall Overcome
Anthem of the American Civil Rights Movement

I wrote my first essay on freedom 7 years ago, on that first Thanksgiving after the horrors of 9/11. In the nearly 50 essays I have written since that fateful day I have struggled to articulate an America that is true to its ideals. As my readers know, while I am unashamedly more socially liberal than conservative, I have always stressed in my essays the ways in which we are united, rather than the ways we are separated. I have also expressed my reading of history, suggesting that we, the people, have become ready for a new generation of American leadership, one designed to bring us together rather than separating us from each other.

I believe America took a major step in that direction on Election Day. And on this special day, the day we, the people, have set aside for us to give thanks for our many blessings, there is nothing I am more thankful for than the outcome of this year’s election.

Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, reminded Americans that we are all friends. Obama said the same thing on election night. We Americans are friends. And friends share what is in their hearts.

Therefore, instead of writing from the perspective of America’s ideals, as I have always done in the past, I have written this essay from my own personal perspective. It reflects the joy in my heart as I have seen our ideals become so much more real in this election. This essay is not about what Obama’s election means to America. It’s about what Obama’s election means to me.

********************************

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’
Dr. Martin Luther King
March on Washington

Three weeks ago, America bestowed on me the greatest gift that a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal can bestow on a citizen. Three weeks ago, we, the people, showed ourselves and the world that America can walk its talk. What a gift.

On Monday evening, the night before the election I was walking Keedo, our dog, up our hill. I was listening to 1960s protest music on my iPod: Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan. Towards the end of the union song Solidarity Forever, Pete Seeger sang “We can bring to birth a new land from the ashes of the old,” As I heard those words I started to see images in my mind from the 1960s—Bobby Kennedy brushing his hair back, Martin Luther King at the March on Washington, Johnson signing the voting rights act. These images from my past began to intersperse with images of Barack Obama. My eyes literally filled with tears for what I hoped America was about to do that next day, election day..

My love of the great American experiment of liberty was instilled in me in a small conservative town in northwestern Pennsylvania. I was in the 4th grade when Mr. Welch taught me about the founders—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin and the others. He taught me about their courage against the British and the wisdom they displayed throughout our Constitution. Mr. Welch made us memorize the defining words of the Declaration—We hold these truths to be self-evident …, the Preamble to the Constitution—We, the People of the United States of America, in order to form a more perfect Union, and the Gettysburg Address, particularly the beginning that defines us as a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and its magnificent ending—that government of the people, by the people and for the people does not perish from the earth. Mr. Welch was the proud grandson of Col. Norman J. Maxwell of the 100th Pennsylvania Volunteers, a union regiment in the Civil War.

My family moved to Detroit, Michigan when I was twelve. It was here that I first saw black and white up-front in America. A white family sold a home on our street to a black family. Fearing a steep drop in home values, all the white homeowners—like lemmings—immediately sold their homes. The neighborhood went from all white to all black seemingly overnight. It seemed to me that the actions of the white families was somewhat misguided as it was their rush to sell their homes that precipitated the steep decline in home prices that they wanted to avoid. Duh! It seemed obvious to me that whites could have kept their home prices high simply by refusing to panic. It was clear that in racism, everyone lost.

I first got involved in the civil rights movement in the late 1950s. One of the images that surfaced as I watched the election results was of me as a young student picketing the Woolworth store in downtown Detroit because Blacks could not sit at Woolworth lunch counters in the South.

Watching the election returns, my mind was full of images from those days of struggle nearly 50 years ago. Images of tear gas and billy clubs on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Other images of police dogs and fire hoses on peaceful marchers. Images of the Birmingham Church Bombing where 3 young girls died. Images of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and too many other martyrs. And those most terrifying of images. Of Bobby. And Jack. And Martin. And Medgar. And Malcolm. Dead. And Kent State. And the 50,000 who died in Vietnam. All Dead.

I cried for my Country as the election returns came in. I cried for all we’ve been through together in the 400 years since the Jamestown Colony and Plymouth Rock to get to this historic night. And I cried tears of joy for the history we had made for America that day. We the people, who engraved slavery into the very fabric of our Constitution. We, the people, only a half century after the yoke of segregation had been lifted from the sons and daughters of slaves. We, the people. Free at last.

It was in the civil rights movement that I came of political age. Mr. Welch may have provided the ingredients—freedom, liberty and a civil body politic—but it was the civil rights movement that forged them into the values I hold most dear. All men and woman are created equal … with liberty and justice for all … so that we may secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

As I sat watching Ohio fall to Obama, I thought again of Dr. King’s prophetic words:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’

As soon as Obama’s victory was assured, I called my son Jonathan. We laughed and cried together, this white man and his African-American son, overjoyed at what we, the people, had done that day.

And my favorite part. The icing on the cake. That extra scoop of ice cream. Black though he may be, Obama wasn’t elected as a Black President. Barack Obama was elected as a President who happens to be Black, just like John Kennedy was elected as a President who happens to be Catholic.

I have never been so proud to be an American.

Let Freedom Ring.

© Copyright 2008. Stan Stahl, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

Constitution Day, 2008

2008-09-17T00:00:00.000-07:00

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of
President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve,
protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Presidential Oath of Office
Constitution of the United States of America

The second American Revolution concluded peacefully on September 17, 1787 with the signing of our Constitution. Coming a mere eleven years after the start of the first American Revolution, we achieved victory in our second revolution through compromise and not the surrender of one party to another.

We, the People are seven weeks away from electing our 44th President since George Washington took the Oath of Office 220 years ago. It is the most hotly divisive election I have ever witnessed, although it may well pale in comparison to other contentious elections.

The world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an imposter, whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.
Thomas Paine
Written of George Washington during the Election of 1796

As is befitting a free people, we Americans become awfully committed to our political persuasion and we are prone to say whatever we need to say to get elected. So we make a lot of noise trying to convince each other, not only that our choice is right, but that the other side is the devil incarnate. Even when the other side is George Washington.

Every generation needs a new revolution.
Thomas Jefferson

America has regularly heeded Jefferson’s advice. Our 3rd revolution began in 1828 with Jackson’s election, the first of our Presidents who wasn’t from the original 13 colonies. Lincoln led us through our 4th, the only time in our history that we failed to find common ground. The two Roosevelt’s led us through revolutions 5 and 6 while the Republican nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964 was the genesis of our 7th.

With the President’s and Congress’ approval ratings at record lows, with bickering and posturing in Washington the order of the day, the time has come for America’s 8th revolution. Both candidates know this. That’s why both are running on a mantra of change. Each believes that he — and he alone — is best prepared to lead America in our first revolution of the 21st century.

Mr. Welch, my 4th grade teacher at Innis Street Elementary School, taught us the story of Washington’s leadership at the Constitutional Convention, how Washington was the catalyst for the compromises of our Constitution.

And even though we were only in the 4th grade, Mr. Welch didn’t shy away from letting us know just how hard these compromises were. Think about it: Half the thirteen states were firm in their belief that slavery was a moral evil while the rest insisted upon it as their God-given right. How far away from common ground is that! And yet — through Washington’s leadership — America found common ground in the Constitutional Convention.

Here lies the quality of leadership required for the next great American Revolution. The 44th President of the United States must lead us in a revolution to find common ground … away from the culture wars and back to the pragmatic idealism of 1787. Not a revolution of surrender but a revolution of compromise. Just like Washington.

Grateful as I am to John McCain for the wartime sacrifice he made for us, it doesn’t matter to me that he is a war hero. I want to know if he can lead America to common ground.

And regardless of the fact that Barack Obama’s election would make this white-American extremely proud, it doesn’t matter to me that he is Black. I want to know if he can lead America to common ground.

Nor does it matter to me if Sarah Palin can see Russia from her living room or if Joe Biden is …well, just plain ol’ Joe Biden. I want to know if they can lead America to common ground.

This election is not about the economy. Or healthcare. Or energy. Or education. Or our foreign policy. It’s not even about whether Sarah Palin believes in global warming or Barack Obama was being sexist for telling a joke about a lipstick-wearing pig.

This election is about choosing a leader for the next great American Revolution, a leader who can help us, We, the People, find our common ground. For that is what it will take to make meaningful progress on the economy, on healthcare, on energy, on education. on our foreign policy, and on the myriad other challenges that America faces.

A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Abraham Lincoln
Matthew 12:25

If the next President cannot lead the nation to common ground, America and the world will suffer.

But if the next President can lead us to the common ground that so many of us yearn for, then this 8th American revolution — our Revolution — may stand with its predecessors, both as testimony to our founders’ faith in the Spirit of Liberty and as a beacon, lighting the way as We, the People lead ourselves to that more perfect union.

Choosing this leader —then making sure he delivers — that is our responsibility in this election.

Let freedom ring.

© Copyright 2008. Stan Stahl, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

Independence Day, 2008

2008-07-04T00:00:00.000-07:00

We live, my dear soul, in an age of trial.
What will be the consequence, I know not.
John Adams to Abigail Adams, 1774

It was a cold winter day in January, 1776 when John Adams left his home in Braintree, Massachusetts for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was one of 56 delegates to the 2nd Continental Congress made up of the British colonies in America. Six months later, they changed the world forever.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Declaration of Independence
July 4, 1776

How audacious of them, these colonists, our forefathers! To think they had rights! To George III, the colonists had no rights, except to pay taxes and do what they were told. To George III, the British government existed to serve his ends. Those he ruled had no say in the matter.

How could it be otherwise? He was the King and being the ruler was his divine right.

But otherwise it was to be, as America stood tall in its first battle for freedom, to win for us the blessings of liberty.

It took John Adams two weeks to ride from Braintree to Philadelphia. Last month Rita and I flew to South Africa — nearly half-way around the world — in less than two days. The world has gotten a whole lot smaller in the 232 years since our founding. It’s also gotten a whole lot freer.

Rita and I were in Cape Town, South Africa on the night the world celebrated Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday. We felt proud in the knowledge that there is a straight line from Adams and Jefferson and Washington and the other founders right to Nelson Mandela.

In Soweto, we witnessed the emergence of a black South African middle-class out of the evils of Apartheid. Over dinner with black friends in Johannesburg we saw in their faces the sweet blessings of liberty.

At a visit to a pre-school in a poor South African village not far from Kruger National Park we met 15 children along with their teachers. The pre-school brings literacy to 150 children in the village, giving them opportunity where before there was none. Their funding comes entirely from private donations and 90% of the donations come from Americans — another straight line from the founders as America so generously shares the blessings of liberty with others less fortunate.

Yes the world has gotten a whole lot freer since our founding ... and the blessings of liberty are becoming ever-more manifest around our shrinking globe. But the world’s also gotten a whole lot more challenging in the last 232 years.

These are the times that try men’s souls.
Thomas Paine, 1776

Unemployment in South Africa is estimated as high as 50%. The new million-dollar homes in Soweto overlook the poor shacks that too many still live in. Eight hundred South Africans a day are said to die of AIDS. And the South African middle-class — both black and white — is very concerned about the effect America’s economy is having on their economy.

While in Zambia at Victoria Falls, Rita and I crossed the bridge into Zimbabwe where Robert Mugabe acts like the reincarnation of George III. Mugabe’s iron-rule in Zimbabwe is part of the karma of Colonialism. There are few blessings of liberty to be found in Zimbabwe.

And where are the blessings of liberty in North Korea? Or Iran? Or even among our allies in Saudi Arabia and Egypt? What few blessings of liberty one finds in Pakistan and Afghanistan are under attack by resurgent Taliban and Al Quada.

And here at home, we find our own blessings of liberty being eroded by $4.50 a gallon gasoline, high food prices, and the continued winding down of the sub-prime mortgage crisis; by the lack of an integrated energy policy; by an out of control health care system; and, of course, by the Iraq war.

Today on the 232nd anniversary of our founding freedoms, America—our America—the America that has given so much to us and so much to the world—is beset with challenges different than any we have ever faced.

Fellow-citizens we cannot escape history. We … will be remembered in spite of ourselves. … The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.
Abraham Lincoln, 1862

During the darkest days of the Civil War, Lincoln understood that either America would make history or history would be made for us. In saving the Union, America made history and government of the people, by the people, for the people did not perish from the Earth.

It is now our time to make history. The torch has been passed to our generation. It falls to us—we, the people—to take the wisdom that is our legacy and apply it to meet the challenges of today.

In July, 1945, President Harry Truman spoke at the raising of the American flag in Berlin. It was the same flag that had flown over the Capitol in Washington on December 7, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor was attacked. “What might easily have been made a routine patriotic display,” wrote Raymond Daniell of The New York Times, “… was turned into a historic occasion by the President’s simple, homely declaration of the faith that had sent millions of American boys into battle.”

We are here today to raise the flag of victory over the capital of our greatest adversary. In doing that, we must remember that in raising that flag we are raising it in the name of the people of the United States, who are looking forward to a better world, a peaceful world, a world in which all the people will have an opportunity to enjoy the good things of life, and not just a few at the top.

Let us not forget that we are fighting for peace, and for the welfare of mankind. We are not fighting for conquest. There is not one piece of territory, or one thing of a monetary nature that we want out of this war. We want peace and prosperity for the world as a whole. We want to see the time come when we can do the things in peace that we have been able to do in war.

If we can put this tremendous machine of ours, which has made this victory possible, to work for peace we can look forward to the greatest age in the history of mankind. That is what we propose to do.

As we raise the flag celebrating 232 years of freedom — 232 years of the blessings of liberty — let us have faith in the great ideals of the founders and of the giants upon whose shoulders we stand.

On this 232nd anniversary of our founding, let us rededicate ourselves to the ideals that are our legacy, securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

Let freedom ring.

© Copyright 2008. Stan Stahl, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

Memorial Day, 2008

2008-05-26T00:00:00.000-07:00

To everything
There is a season
And a time for every purpose under heaven

Memorial Day is the season of our mourning. It is the time for us, the living, to remember those, the dead. It is the time to grieve for those who fell so that you and I might live free. It is also the time to grieve for all those who died without ever tasting the sweet blessings of liberty.

But that is not its purpose, this mourning, this grieving. No. The purpose of Memorial Day is to help us set our moral compass, charting our future, creating a world where all are free, where none need die so that others might live free.

How many years can some people exist
before they’re allowed to be free?

In less than 3 weeks Rita and I will be in South Africa. While Rita has been planning this trip for nearly two years, I feel like I have been preparing for this trip my whole life. For I see in South Africa bookends for the entire human experience from which evolves our commitment to freedom. And I am so looking forward to tasting this experience, not in books and movies, but first-hand with my own eyes and my own heart.

South Africa and the lands to its North and East are the birthplace of our species. It was here that our ancestors not only first stood on their hind legs but also began to evolve the moral compass that two million years later would lead directly to the great American experiment in government of the people, by the people and for the people.

South Africa is also today home to its own great experiment in freedom. Fifteen years ago South Africa was legally segregated by an Apartheid in which native Africans were not free; they had no liberty and little justice. For the last fifteen years South Africa has been struggling mightily to reset its moral compass, intent on evolving a future where all are free. They are doing it without violent revolution and with a commitment to reconciliation, and it is in the world’s interest … it is in our own interest … that they succeed.

One hundred and forty five years ago in 1863, America’s own experiment in freedom was in jeopardy of perishing from the Earth. Four score and seven years earlier our fathers had brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. In 1863 America was engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

Lincoln at Gettysburg, at this bloodiest battle of America’s civil war, at this time of the greatest sacrifice our nation has known, set clearly America’s moral compass:

It is for us the living … to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is … for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—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.

The human heart hungers to be free. We see this in our children as they first crawl and then walk and then even more when they turn two, or become teenagers. Freedom is built into us, every bit as much as the instinct to breathe.

Our hearts don’t hunger only for our own freedom. Our hearts also hunger for the freedom of others. Every parent knows this. Our hearts understand that, as Martin Luther King reminded us, justice denied anywhere diminishes justice everywhere.

It is in our hearts’ deepest yearnings for freedom that we give that last full measure of devotion. That’s what lets a man throw himself on a grenade so that his unit may live. It’s what lets a woman fly a chopper into battle so she can rescue her comrades. It’s what led James Cheney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner to their deaths bringing freedom to segregated Mississippi in the summer of 1963 as it led Stephen Biko to his in South Africa in 1977. My sense of history, if not my religious beliefs, leads me to think that this is what led Moses back to Egypt and Jesus to the cross.

To die for someone else, to die for a cause greater than ourselves, to give that last full measure of devotion … this most miraculous aspect of our human spirit had its origins with our species two million years ago on the plains of Africa, at a time when giving one’s last full measure of devotion often meant being a meal for a pride of lions.

Two million years ago on the plains of Africa ... that’s how deeply the love of freedom lives in our hearts ... that’s how deeply we are bound together as a species ... that’s how deeply we care about liberty and justice for all ... The love of freedom lives at the very core of our moral being, an expression of the very logic of our DNA, the essence of what it means to be human.

So let us use this Memorial Day as an opportunity to check the setting of our compass, pointing it always towards freedom, not just for ourselves but for all of us. As we remember those who died securing our freedoms, let us open our hearts to those who are still not free. And let us also always act in ways that are respectful of the freedom of others. "Let us,” as Lincoln said, “have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

Let freedom ring.

© 2008 Copyright. Stan Stahl, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

Earth Day, 2008

2008-04-22T00:00:00.000-07:00

Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them
Albert Einstein

On that first Earth Day, 38 years ago, I was a graduate student at The University of Michigan. Six years earlier Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring awakened many of us to the possibility that human invention could seriously impact life on Earth. And now, 38 years later, we are beset with environmental challenges no one even imagined back in 1970.

This is not the place to write about causes or technical solutions. I’ll leave that to others. My purpose is to look at the human context of these challenges – the place where our dreams, our aspirations, and our fears collide – and the place from which solutions will emerge.

It’s the context of the founders when they wrote the Declaration and the Constitution, and of Lincoln four score years later. And it’s the context of today’s culture wars.

Ultimately, it is the most important challenge of a free people.

Because if we, the people, can’t even agree on the problem – or whether there even is a problem – than what chance have we, the people – you and me – of bequeathing the blessings of liberty to our posterity. And isn’t that our responsibility – to bequeath the blessings of liberty to our posterity – as it was for the generations that came before us?

It seems to me that no matter what else you might think about climate change and other environmental challenges, you must acknowledge that they are serious. Just as you must acknowledge – regardless of your political point-of-view – that the situation in the Middle East is serious, our economic situation is serious, and our health care challenges – made worse by the aging of our population – are serious. And this list only scratches the surface.

We, the people, face serious challenges.

And serious challenges demand serious solutions.

And serious solutions require informed dialogue.

Meanwhile, instead of informed dialogue, we, the people, have stopped talking with each other. We read what we already agree with. We follow the network that gives us the news with our particular slant. And when we do come together, it is to prove that ours is the correct point-of-view. In these most serious of times, we, the people are all too often talking past each other, rather than with each other, arguing and debating instead of problem-solving.

Miracles occur in the strangest of places.
Willie Nelson

I have a business colleague, Ted. Ted is a conservative pro-life religious Christian Republican as I am a liberal free-choice secular Jewish Democrat. I doubt that there’s an issue on the political agenda on which Ted and I agree. Ted and I could be poster children for America’s culture wars. But we’re not. We’re friends.

Over the course of our business relationship, Ted and I have learned to listen to each other’s stories. As we’ve discussed our concerns for our children’s future and our love of the American ideal, we have come to explore our political leanings and our religious beliefs. Not surprisingly, we have come to discover that beneath the surface we share the same dreams, the same aspirations, and even the same fears. As we’ve listened to each other, we’ve also cried for each other. As Ted and I have experienced each other’s humanity, both of us have become more tolerant, we’ve tempered our views, we’ve learned to see each other’s point-of-view, we’ve begun to find common ground, and we’ve experienced the growth that can lie in a difference of opinion.

I’m sure you learned, as I did, that you should never talk politics or religion. It’s bad for business I’ve been told. My experience with Ted – and the many “Teds” I’ve spoken with since I started writing these essays on freedom seven years ago – convince me that this is no longer true. My experience since that first Thanksgiving after the horrors of 9/11 is exactly the opposite. Americans hunger for people with whom they can discuss politics and religion. We crave it, perhaps more so as we are forced to confront the magnitude of the challenges we face. We want to talk about politics and religion. We just don’t want to be argued with, or made to feel inferior.

Americans hunger for someone who will listen to them about their deepest hopes, their aspirations, and their fears, and of the religious beliefs that give meaning and purpose to their lives. And the miracle is that as we listen to them, learning to empathize with their reality, they listen to us, and learn to empathize with our reality.

If we carry with us the spirit of liberty everywhere we go, and if we let it infuse our discussions with each other – discussions about our politics and our purpose on Earth – we, the people will cease being strangers to each other, an enemy not to be trusted. We will become, instead, friends.

The spirit of liberty is America at our most creative, our most imaginative, our most compassionate.

The spirit of liberty is America’s great gift to the world.

And it is with the spirit of liberty that – as one – all the peoples of the world can meet the challenges of this Earth Day and the challenges of Earth Days to come.

So let us dedicate ourselves to carrying the spirit of liberty with us, we, the people, so that we may meet the challenges that lie before us, being also, by our own example, an inspiration to the peoples of the world to create an Earth at peace, with liberty, justice and opportunity for all.

Let freedom ring.

© Copyright 2008. Stan Stahl, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

Martin Luther King Day, 2008

2008-01-21T00:00:00.000-08:00

“The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice!”
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sixty years ago, in 1948, Southern Democrats, led by South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, broke from the Democratic Party because Northern liberals introduced a civil rights plank into the Democratic platform. Thurmond and his allies formed the States' Rights Democratic Party, whose slogan was "Segregation Forever!" In addition to winning South Carolina in the general election, the party also won the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

In 5 days, Democrats in South Carolina will make their choice for the Democratic nominee for President. The general consensus is that one of two candidates will win. One happens to be black. The other happens to be a woman.

Set aside for the moment what you might think of Senator Obama and Senator Clinton. That’s not what this moment is about. This is a moment to reflect on how far we have come in 60 years.

Sixty years ago, “Negroes” in Thurmond’s segregated South Carolina paid taxes but could not vote, sent their children to segregated schools, drank from segregated water fountains, sat in the back of the bus, could not eat at the “Whites Only” lunch counter, swim in the “Whites Only” pool, or pray in the “Whites Only” churches, had to cross the street when a white man was coming, and lived in fear of beatings, burnings and lynchings.

“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.”

And now, 60 years after "Segregation Forever," a black man and a woman are competing to win the South Carolina Democratic Presidential primary.

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’”

Imagine that young black child, or that young girl, in 1963, the year of the March on Washington, the year Martin Luther King gave his I Have a Dream speech. Imagine this young man and woman dreaming of becoming President of the United States of America.

“I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Dreams come in all the colors of the human rainbow. Dreams cross the cultural divide. Heartfelt dreams for ennobling the human spirit live in the secular left and the religious right, and everyplace in between ... Dreams that carry within them the heart and soul of America.

King has been gone for nearly 40 years. But his dream did not die with him. We see it alive today in the candidacies of Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton.

“This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, ‘My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.’”

Unlike 40 years ago, we now live in a global community. And so, as we continue to work to make Martin Luther King’s dream a reality in America, let us also imagine a world in which all share the dream.

“I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the ‘isness’ of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal ‘oughtness’ that forever confronts him.”

Let us dream of the day Iraqis live together in peace and freedom, their present nightmare a relic of an earlier past.

Let us dream of the day when Israeli and Palestinian stand together, proud and tall in a Middle East oasis that their combined energies have created.

Let us dream of the day when Afghans, Pakistanis, and all those throughout the Middle East live free, with liberty and justice for all.

Let us dream of the day when the peoples of Iran and the peoples of North Korea live together with America in peace and freedom.

Let us dream of the day when the peoples of Africa and other economically depressed regions of the world share in the blessings of freedom and liberty.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

If America is to be what Jefferson described as the best hope of mankind, it will be so to the extent that Martin Luther King’s dream has become the American reality. So let us dream most of all of the day when all of our own people live in an America that offers opportunity to all, where all of our people can contribute to the great tasks that lie ahead of us.

“When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank god, I’m free at last.’”

Holiday Season, 2007

2007-12-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

Peace on Earth. Good Will Toward All.

In less than two weeks, we, the people, will begin for real the task of selecting our next President.

Beginning January 3rd in Iowa and ending ten months later on election night next November, we, the people, embark upon the most awesome responsibility free people have—the responsibility to choose that man or woman we most trust to guide us through the challenges and pitfalls we see all around us, leading us, we hope and pray, to the realization of our hopes and dreams.

The founders had great faith in we, the people. Their faith was forged in their experiences in the New World. Theirs was a faith that found voice in the Constitution’s exquisite mechanism of checks and balances, with its simple Preamble of hope to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

And in less than two weeks, starting in Iowa, the time will come for us to live up to their faith.

Being human, we will, of course, vote our own self interest. The founders understood this, as they understood human nature; that this was OK, as Rabbi Hillel reminded us more than 2,000 years ago: If I am not for myself, who will be?

But there’s an interesting twist here, one the founders also understood very well; a twist that takes us back to the meaning of the Holiday season. The Holiday season – with its message of Peace and Goodwill – is a reminder that our own self-interest is inextricably bound up with the self-interest of our neighbors.

For how are we to achieve Peace and Goodwill? Is it to be achieved by the victory of one faction over another? Are the losers in such a battle simply to roll over and submit, like a pet dog that discovers he’s not the alpha-male? Where is the goodwill in that? And how long can peace last where there is no goodwill?

No ... peace and goodwill are not to be achieved by the win-lose victory of one faction over another.

If we are to achieve peace and goodwill, we must do it some other way. And that leads us right straight back to the founders and beyond.

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
Benjamin Franklin

Set aside for a moment, in this season of reflection, the culture wars and all the other differences that divide us.

Focus instead on what unites us.

There is much we share, much we, the people, have in common.

For the most part, we all want the same things. We want safety and security. We want the opportunity to work, to earn a living for ourselves and our family, to contribute to a better world. We want to fall in love and create a family. We want to live together in our community, happy in the knowledge that we are bound by the ties of family and friends. We want love and affection. And we want to feel like we belong.

Politically, even as we want to belong, we also want to be free. Most importantly, we want the right to believe what our spirit sings to us, and we want to be secure that this right is protected, even if it is not fully respected.

We all want to partake of the blessings of liberty, for ourselves and our posterity.

**********

Love thy neighbor as thyself. That which is hateful to you, do not do to another.

Perhaps what we, the people have most in common is our belief in the golden rule. The golden rule in one form or another is found in every major religious tradition on the planet. It is a core value not only of Christianity and Judaism, but Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism as well. A Native American proverb says it most pragmatically: The best place to keep surplus meat is in the belly of your neighbor. Feed your neighbor when he’s hungry and he’ll feed you when it’s you who are hungry.

The golden rule was discovered by sages during times of war and violence, during times when old values were breaking down and new ones were needed. The golden rule solved the challenge of controlling aggressive behavior by emphasizing our human connectedness, the compassion we have for one another.

Two thousand years after Jesus and Hillel, in another period of war and violence, a great American President articulated the same basic truth:

If we, the people, are to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity, our objective must be nothing less than to live by the golden rule. For without liberty for all, there can be liberty for none.

This simple wisdom can serve to guide us through next year’s elections, the wisdom that says “We are friends. Yet we have differences. Let us open our hearts and our souls to each other, sharing our dreams and our fears. Let us reason together, as free men and women, trusting that, in our mutual friendship, in the spirit of liberty, we will find our common ground. And in that common ground, let us do great things together.”

Let freedom ring.

© Copyright 2007. Stan Stahl, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

Thanksgiving, 2007

2007-11-22T00:00:00.000-08:00

If I have seen further than my fellow man it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
Isaac Newton

I vividly remember what Mr. Welch, my fourth grade teacher, taught us about Thanksgiving. Mr. Welch, the youngest grandson of Col. Norman J. Maxwell of the 100th Pennsylvania Volunteers, a union regiment in the Civil War, made very sure his students knew that the first Thanksgiving was celebrated by people who had come to America seeking religious freedom.

Mr. Welch cared a lot about religious freedom, the freedom we Americans have to believe what we wish. Mr. Welch cared a lot about America and all the freedoms we have. A patriot long before the right wing took over the word for their own use, he would come into class on the morning of Election Day carrying the corner of his paper ballot with the number 1 on it, always the first person in his precinct to vote. With freedom came responsibility.

So we learned in Mr. Welch’s class how the Pilgrims had come to America to escape the religious intolerance they found in England. And how the Pilgrims had then become intolerant of other religions but that by the time of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and the other Founders, these wise men had come to understand that separating religion from the State was good both for religion and for the State. And so they did, in the very first Amendment to our Constitution.

In America we were free to believe what we wished, As Emerson reminded us nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own minds.

Mr. Welch’s lessons rang home to me. As a young boy, I had heard stories of how my Grandparents had come to America because Jews had far greater opportunities in America than we had in Europe. Too young to remember the Second World War, I do remember when my Aunt Rosella came to America in the late 1940s, a survivor of Hitler’s death camps … the place where Hitler gassed and burned more than 6,000,000 Jews, along with Catholics, homosexuals, and any others that the Nazi butchers chose to blame for Germany’s troubles.

But in America, we could not be persecuted for our religious beliefs. Christians, Jews, Catholics, Moslems, Buddhists … it didn’t matter. In the eyes of the state, we are all equal.

That’s a lot to live up to. Especially in todays culture wars.

But live up to our ideals we must. This is our responsibility, we, the people.

We, the people, have a lot of people to thank today, for we all stand on the shoulders of giants, men and women whose legacy we have inherited and whose legacy we will in time pass on.

We stand on the shoulders of our parents, our grandparents, our uncles and aunts, our great-grandparents and so on back to the beginning of time without whose hard work, courage, and faith, along with a not inconsiderable bit of luck, we might not even be here at all.

We stand on the shoulders of the Pilgrims and their desire to find a home where they could practice their religion in peace, forever grateful to them for bequeathing to us the concept of a civil body politik.

We stand on the exceptionally broad shoulders of the Founders, extremely grateful for their wisdom and courage in creating a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, a country where the right to believe what we want is our birthright, not a right given to us by the King.

We stand on the shoulders of our teachers, people like Mr. Welch, for passing down to their young students the great traditions of American freedom and democracy, so that American history might become more than something to be learned in books, but attitudes and behaviors that can infuse our every action, even today more than half a century later.

We stand on the shoulders of our great philosophers and religious leaders who have taught us to pursue justice and righteousness and knowledge and beauty and wisdom and, especially, peace; who have taught us personal responsibility and the true meaning of respect: respect for each other, for our past, and for our future; who continue to teach us that it is our responsibility to get along, to find ways to cooperate, that we are all one people who must learn to live together on one Earth.

We stand on so many shoulders. We have so much to be thankful for.

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget
that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy

So on this Thanksgiving let us give thanks to all who have come before us, all those men and women on whose broad shoulders you and I stand, those men and women who have secured the blessings of liberty for us all.

But let us also on this Thanksgiving rededicate ourselves to the unfinished work that lies ahead … to heal the sick, to raise the poor, to provide equal opportunity for all, to put an end to war, to protect the planet, and to secure the blessings of liberty for our posterity as those who have come before secured these blessings for us.

Let us rededicate ourselves on this Thanksgiving to creating a world in which our children and our children’s children and their children for even a thousand years can look back on our time with gratitude and thanksgiving for having given them shoulders to stand on worthy of the shoulders upon which we ourselves stand.

Let freedom ring.

Copyright © 2007. Stan Stahl. All Rights Reserved.

Constitution Day, 2007

2007-09-17T00:00:00.000-07:00

We, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Preamble to the Constitution
United States of America

In the 1790s, Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, was a leading newspaperman and Anti-Federalist in Philadelphia. A strong critic of George Washington, Bache’s anti-federalist tirades were little more than character assassinations of the President. In one of these attacks, Bache even accused Washington of having been a British spy during the Revolution, planning to sell out the country until Benedict Arnold beat him to the punch!

So vitriolic were the Anti-Federalists that in 1796, Thomas Paine – whose words these are the times that try men's souls had 20 years earlier helped ignite the American Revolution – published an essay in Bache’s newspaper in which he wrote of the President:

the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.

Several events these last few weeks have brought the story of these attacks on Washington to mind. The first is watching the speed at which conservative Republicans distanced themselves from Idaho Senator Larry Craig after Craig’s sexual orientation became suspect. The second was an email I received from the ultra-Liberal organization MoveOn with the subject “Democrats in Name Only.” Then just last week, MoveOn published a full page ad in the New York Times in which they suggested that General Petraeus should be renamed “General Betray Us.”

If two people work for me and they agree all the time, one of them is worthless. If they disagree all the time, they’re both worthless.

Sam Goldwyn

As Paine’s denunciation of the Father of Our Country so well illustrates, factions are as American as apple pie.

Less obvious though, is that factions come along with freedom and liberty, like some kind of Siamese triplets.

Liberty, as James Madison so wisely understood, was the very cause of faction. Different people think differently and have different interests. Those with similar attitudes and objectives often bond together, seeking to accomplish their agenda in the political marketplace. The result is faction.

To eliminate factions was to destroy liberty, replacing it with tyranny. For Madison “the remedy … was worse than the disease.” Factions are evidence of the resiliency of liberty and it is through their growth and decay that the blessings of liberty evolve through history.

So factions we must have. Indeed we should glory in them, for they are the very expression of the liberties we hold so dear.

But we’ve also got work to do. Difficult challenges to solve. A future to build.

And right now, at this moment in America’s history, when the world needs our leadership more than ever, we, the people, are being held captive by factions of the right and the left that have taken control of our Government. These factions subject us to never-ending inconsequential debates whose every nuance is designed to win – or at least not lose – the support of some intolerant faction.

To use Iraq as an example, all these debates simply aren’t solving the problem. America doesn’t need nuanced debates and less-nuanced arguments over how many troops can come home when. And we certainly don’t need factions taking cheap shots at fellow Americans who are doing their very best in a very difficult, incredibly challenging situation.

What we do need is for our elected officials to sit down in a room and not come out until they have a unified plan for dealing with Iraq. The plan must be realistic, it has to reflect America’s legitimate interests, and, particularly since we brought this devastation to Iraq, it has to reflect our moral principles. And it must be based on a consensus that can win the support of the American people.

Solving our Iraqi morass is just one example of what America needs at this moment of our history. America has lots of challenges and we need to start working together to solve them: security, health care, social security, the economy, immigration, global warming, etc, etc, etc.

What we do not need are factions that paralyze our ability to get anything done. And all the anger, all the hostility, all the distrust, all the if they’re for it, I must be against it mentality of the true believer factions; their very attitude of us vs them puts America, perhaps the world, at great risk. This we do not need.

America needs a new kind of faction, not a true believer faction but a pragmatic faction. A faction dedicated to meeting our political challenges with the same kind of wisdom and courage the founders showed 220 years ago when they produced our Constitution. A no-faction faction committed to practical results reflecting America at our best.

True believer factions are dangerous precisely because they insist that the outcome be the way they want. In this they reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of liberty, for liberty requires compromise. Without compromise, it’s me or you. Either you force me to give up some of my liberty or I force you to give up some of yours. That’s not America. It’s tyranny.

American pragmatism understands the necessity of compromise. More importantly it understands that the blessings of liberty flow from the creative act of win-win-win compromise. Understanding this, the pragmatist is not afraid to let the outcome freely evolve based on the needs and wisdom of the people.

In this way, American pragmatism reflects the deeply spiritual American point-of-view that Jefferson captured in the words of the Declaration – we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …. American pragmatism is deeply spiritual without being specific to any religion or other belief system. In this, it honors them all.

This new American pragmatism is already emerging. We have seen it in the Senators who compromised on judges in the last Session. And the ones who tried to pass an immigration reform bill. And in the States where Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example, is governing with an explicitly pragmatic agenda.

There was a painting of the sun on the back of the chair from which George Washington presided over the Constitutional convention. The painting made it impossible to tell whether the sun was rising or setting. Benjamin Franklin – grandfather both of the Revolution and of Washington’s future arch-enemy -- recognized as much when he said “All through the convention I have wondered if this was a rising or a setting sun. Now I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”

Now it’s up to us. We, the people.

Is it to remain a rising sun for us, too, that we may bequeath the blessings of liberty to our children? Or is it for us to be a setting sun?

The answer depends on how quickly we break the tyrannical shackles of the true believer factions, forming a new American majority dedicated to pragmatically meeting our responsibility to form that ever-more perfect union.

Let freedom ring.

Copyright © 2007. Stan Stahl. All Rights Reserved.

Independence Day, 2007

2007-07-04T00:00:00.001-07:00

E Pluribus Unum
From Many, One

Two hundred thirty one years ago 56 Patriots pledged their lives, liberties and sacred honor to the vision that we, their descendants, might partake of the blessings of liberty. Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists. Eleven were merchants. Nine more were farmers and large plantation owners. Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware. Virginia and Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Thirteen colonies, each different from the rest, brought together by a hatred of tyranny and by a common vision of mankind, a vision as ancient as Jerusalem and Athens and as new as the part of the world they called home.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Declaration of Independence
July 4, 1776

Eight score and sixteen years later, I fell in love with America in Mr. Welch’s 4th grade classroom at Innis Street Elementary School in Oil City, Pennsylvania. Oil City was a small conservative Republican town of 20,000 people, seven miles from where the world’s first oil well was drilled.

I loved hearing Mr. Welch’s exciting stories of the revolutionary war and the heroes who had secured us our liberty: the shots heard ‘round the world at Lexington and Concord; Patrick Henry’s stirring speech “Give me liberty or give me death;" the freezing winter at Valley Forge when it seemed all was lost; Washington’s daring Christmas Eve raid across the Delaware; John Paul Jones’ courageous refusal to surrender “I have not yet begun to fight;” Nathan Hale at the gallows proclaiming “My only regret is that I have but one life to give to my country;” and Washington’s great victory at Yorktown in 1781.

Mr. Welch taught us how important it was to America’s birth that the 13 former British colonies stick together, impressing upon us Benjamin Franklin’s memorable words: “We must all hang together or surely we will all hang separately.” He taught us the meaning of the sacred words of American unity emblazoned on the Great Seal of the United States, developed in 1782, even before the revolution was won: E Pluribus Unum—From Many, One.

In the middle of the Cold War, with Josef Stalin threatening America from without and Joe McCarthy threatening us from within, this wise teacher from conservative Western Pennsylvania taught his young charges that America’s past and future greatness flowed from the Founder’s commitment to liberty and justice for all. E Pluribus Unum—From Many, One.

With a strong commitment to civil rights and a natural tendency towards peace rather than war, I came of political age during the 1960s. These turbulent times were, in retrospect, the beginnings of the culture wars we still see today. Both the left and the right claimed to believe deeply in the spirit of E Pluribus Unum. The challenge was which Pluribus. To the political Right, I and those like me were, as Vice President Spiro Agnew called us, “the nattering nabobs of negativism." Meanwhile we on the Left protesting the war angrily marched in the streets of America chanting “Hey, Hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill today?” Each side knew it was right. Each side saw the other as Un-American. Each side wanted to dominate the other. Either … Or. There wasn’t a whole lot of Unum in the 60s.

Fifteen years later I got my first deep lesson in E Pluribus Unum. Having shed my hippie ways for the military-industrial complex, I saw with my own eyes the nature of the threat we faced from the Soviet Union. To this day I remain committed to finding peaceful solutions to complex problems, but it was in those days that I also came to be truly grateful for the men and women who keep us out of harm’s way.

In the 1980s, far away from Mr. Welch’s classrooms, I came to understand that E Pluribus Unum means pacifists and soldiers. It doesn’t mean pacifists or soldiers. America’s strength rests on us having both.

There are, to our great misfortune, too many “either … or’s” in America today: near-gridlock between Congress and the White House on how to solve the Iraqi morass; failure of the recent immigration reform bill; religious and cultural wars of the grossest intolerance; and a media that attracts viewers with anger and bickering rather than heartfelt dialogue and rigorous inquiry. Like the 1960s, not a whole lot of Unum.

Meanwhile the enemies of E Pluribus Unum are gathering strength. If 9/11 taught us anything it is that not everyone in the world believes in E Pluribus Unum. And, as this week’s attempted terrorist bombings in England demonstrate, those who don’t believe in E Pluribus Unum pose a clear and present danger to liberty and freedom everywhere.

In 1990, I had the great joy of seeing Independence Day fireworks in the American Sector in Berlin. It was nine months after the Berlin Wall came down, nine months after freedom finally came to Eastern Europe. I had been in Prague and Budapest the previous week where I could literally see freedom on the faces of the people. I so enjoyed that most-wonderful of Independence Days, my wife and our friends celebrating freedom’s beginnings with the American men and women whose bravery and courage had kept the dream of freedom alive through those 45 long dark years of tyranny.

On this Independence Day 2007, I feel incredibly grateful to the Founders, to their wisdom, to their courage, and to the great principles of cooperation they bequeathed us. E Pluribus Unum—From Many, One. How could we dream of peace if we weren’t protected by those with a different calling? And what would they have worth protecting if none dared dream of peace?

So let’s commit this Independence Day to emulate the Founding Fathers, to rededicate ourselves to the great task before us of creating a world in which all are free, recognizing that our success requires, as Franklin reminded us, that “We must all hang together or surely we will all hang separately.”

On this Independence Day, let us drink deeply from that great wellspring of American freedom: E Pluribus Unum—From Many, One.

Let freedom ring.

© Copyright 2007. Stan Stahl, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

Memorial Day, 2007

2007-05-26T00:00:00.000-07:00

How many times must we tell the tale?
How many times must we fall?

Eric Clapton

This week brought two provocative items across my desk. One was a news report of the recent Pew poll showing that about one in four American Muslims under 30 believe suicide bombing in defense of Islam is justified in at least some circumstances. Another was a mailing I received from the Zionist Organization of America. The envelope read “Negotiating with terrorists … negotiating one’s own demise.”

Hearts are hard. We speak past each other instead of to each other. And people die.

I can imagine circumstances where I would voluntarily give up my life if it could save my family and the people I love. Even as a pacifist, if the only way I could save my family was to commit suicide while taking out their attackers, so be it.

And if terrorists are only using negotiations as a way of achieving an advantage in support of their stated aim to destroy me, then I am absolutely right to refuse to negotiate with them.

But with all due respect to everyone who is trapped inside their hard rigid opinions (myself included), I think the situation is a little deeper. And I’d like to suggest that we owe it to those whose memories we honor today, to take this deeper look.

If I have a seen a little further than my fellow man,
it is because I stand upon the shoulders of giants.

Sir Isaac Newton

Over 300 years ago, Galileo and Newton launched a revolution in mankind’s understanding of the physical world. Their genius was in recognizing that it is not enough to pay attention to how things are. One must also pay attention to how things are changing.

And in the human sphere, as well, we must pay attention not just to how things are, but to how they are changing. Even more importantly, we must ask what we can do to change things. For our future will be what we make of it.

What can we do to lower the percentage of Muslim youth believing suicide bombing is justified? What can we do to simultaneously grow a new generation of Palestinians who accept living in peace with Israel while growing a new generation of American Zionist organizations who advocate negotiating with them?

Like Newton, we, too, stand on the shoulders of giants. We can honor their memories by applying their understanding to helping us get out of the morass we find ourselves in.

Ah the history books tell it,
They tell it so well.
The cavalries charged,
The Indians fell.
The cavalries charged,
The Indians died.
The country was young then,
With God on its side.

Bob Dylan

History tells us that none of us have clean hands. The very fact that we are here almost certainly means that somewhere in our distant past our predecessors trampled on the rights, if not the very lives, of others. Civilization, to the extent we are achieving it, is coming very slowly to our species.

It seems to me that this is what Jesus meant when he said to pay attention to the wooden beam in our own eye, not the splinter in the eye of others. In matters of peace, humility is not just a virtue but a necessity.

The world is small and it’s getting smaller. And the simple reality is that we have to learn to live with this fact. We have no acceptable alternative to learning to live in peace. Even if not impractical, it would be immoral to kill all of them. And we sure aren’t about to let them defeat us and our way of life. Nor is the present increasingly hostile situation acceptable. Where can it lead but to more war?

Change we must. We’re on this planet together. We survive or fail together. And the sooner we recognize this simple fact, the more quickly will the world become more peaceful.

Imagine, if we all lived this basic American principle. Imagine if we set aside our own belief in our own rightness; if we truly sought to understand each other instead of throwing slogans past each other; if we truly weighed their interests alongside our own. How quickly hearts would soften.

We, the people, by our attitudes, our words, and our actions can change the direction of history. We, the people, have it in our power to make this a safer world.

All it takes is the courage to build bridges where others still build walls.

What better way to honor those who gave the last full measure of devotion … that government of the people, by the people, for the people has not perished from the earth.

Let freedom ring.

© Copyright 2007. Stan Stahl, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

Martin Luther King Day, 2007

2007-01-15T00:00:00.000-08:00

“The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice!”
Martin Luther King, Jr.

It’s been more than 40 years since Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” sermon on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial; more than 40 years since blacks in America’s south could not drink from public water fountains, could not sit at “whites only” lunch counters, could not attend state Universities, could not vote, and could not peacefully demonstrate for their freedom.

I have never understood racial intolerance. Science and religion are united on our unity, our oneness. We are all one people. We are not black or white or red or yellow (or green or purple). Science tells us that we are genetically identical, all descended from a common ancestor 7,000,000 years ago in Africa.

Religions, too, preach the unity of our species; all of us are children of the same one god. Whether we contemplate the mystery of our place in the universe as Jews or Christians or Moslems or Hindus or Buddhists, or even as agnostics or atheists, we contemplate it in the context of our common humanity.

And all religions recognize the golden rule, to love thy neighbor as thyself, to treat others as we would want to be treated, to avoid doing to others what is hateful to ourselves.

We are all one species. We are all interconnected. For as King reminded us from the Birmingham jail:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

King also understood that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice only to the extent that we, the people, so bend it.

Let us therefore seize the opportunity of Martin Luther King Day to rededicate our efforts in support of universal racial harmony and opportunity.

Let us not cease our efforts until Martin Luther King’s dream becomes reality:

“I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.”

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’”

“I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

“I have a dream today.”

Unlike 40 years ago, we now live in a global community. And so, as we work to make Martin Luther King’s dream a reality in America, we must also work to extend it throughout the world.

We must dream of the day when the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds of Iraq live together in peace and freedom, their present nightmare a relic of an earlier past.

We must dream of the day when Israeli and Palestinian stand together, proud and tall in a Middle East oasis that their combined energies have created.

We must dream of the day when Pakistanis and Indians peacefully resolve their differences over a free Kashmir.

We must dream of the day when the peoples of Iran and the peoples of North Korea live together with America in peace and freedom.

We must dream of the day when the peoples of Africa and other economically depressed regions of the world share in the blessings of freedom and liberty.

We must dream of the day when all of our own people live in an America that offers opportunity to all, where all of our children can contribute to the great tasks that lie ahead of us.

As we’ve learned in Iraq, freedom does not come easy. It can’t be imposed. Elections don’t necessarily result in freedom. Elections can also result in civil wars.

As King intuitively understood, as all who have believed in non-violence understand, freedom cannot be forced on others. Freedom is the removal of pressure, not its imposition.

America’s opportunity to shape the world for good is to show by our example how a diverse population can live together in harmony, with mutual respect and understanding, working creatively to evolve a society that works for all.

If America is to be what Jefferson described as the best hope of mankind, it will be so to the extent that Martin Luther King’s dream has become the American reality.

“Let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!”

“Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!”

“Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!”

“But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!”

“Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!”

“When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank god, I’m free at last.”

Holiday Season, 2006

2006-12-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

Peace on Earth. Good will to all.
Christmas Blessing

In 1956, nine years into the Cold War, President Dwight Eisenhower launched a cultural exchange program with the Soviet Union. His goal was to forge a bond of understanding with America’s enemy.

Eisenhower was no Neville Chamberlain, misguidedly attempting to appease a voracious enemy. As Supreme Allied Commander leading the free world to victory against Hitler, Eisenhower understood both the reality of evil and the horrific human cost of Chamberlain’s naivety.

Eisenhower did not reach out to the Soviet Union to appease them. He reached out so that America could better understand them and they could better understand us. His hope was that if we understood each other better the distrust between us might dissolve away, allowing us to discover that under the skin we are all the same.

**********

The holiday seasons are a time for being with family and loved ones. This year, like last year and the year before and the year before that, there are too many empty chairs around America’s tables, too many empty chairs around the tables of the Iraqis, and the Israelis, and the Palestinians, and the Lebanese, and the 250,000 victims of genocide in Darfur.

The holiday season may be a time to celebrate with our families but it is also a time to reflect on man’s inhumanity to man. The world is still at war 2,000 years after the birth of the Christians' Prince of Peace.

What do we want to do about it? We, the people. It’s our country. It’s our ability to influence the world. The founders gave this to us with the hope that we could secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity as they they had done for us.

What do we, the people, want to do about it? Not the politicians. Not the generals. But us. We, the people.

One of the messages I read in the recent elections is that we’re more than ready to take up the question. It seems to me that we, the people, are ready for bold new ideas about how to get along in a globalized world.

The bold new idea we need is 2,000 years old. We all know it. It forms the very core of our belief systems. During the 1,000 years centered around the lives of Hillel and Jesus, the simple truth was discovered and rediscovered throughout the Middle East, India and Asia by people like the Buddha, Confucius, Hillel, Jesus and Mohammed.

**********

The Talmud tells the story of Rabbi Hillel that a pagan came to him and sarcastically said: “Jew. Teach me your entire Torah while I stand on one foot.” Hillel is said to have replied to him “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole of the Torah. The remainder is but commentary. Go learn it.”

About a hundred years later, Paul states the same bold new idea: “Bless those who persecute you: never curse them, bless them. … Treat everyone with equal kindness. … Never repay evil with evil but let everyone see that you are interested only in the highest ideals. Do all you can to live at peace with everyone. Never try to get revenge; leave that, my friends, to God's anger. … If your enemy is hungry, you should give him food, and if he is thirsty, let him drink.”

Islam recognizes this same bold new idea. In the Hadith it is written “Not one of you is a believer until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.” Indeed, according to religious scholar Karen Armstrong, the basic message of the Qur’an is one of compassion.

So does Hinduism: “One should not behave towards others in a way which is disagreeable to oneself. This is the essence of morality. All other activities are due to selfish desire.”

And Confucianism: “Try your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself, and you will find that this is the shortest way to benevolence.”

Even the Yorubas of Nigeria: “One going to take a pointed stick to pinch a baby bird should first try it on himself to feel how it hurts.”

The Golden Rule was discovered by sages during times of war and violence, during times when the old values were breaking down. It sought to solve the challenge of controlling aggressive behavior by emphasizing our human connectedness, the compassion we have for one another.

Two thousand years after Jesus and twelve hundred years after Mohammed, in another period of war and violence, a great American President rediscovered the same basic truth.

**********

If we, the people, are to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity, our objective must be nothing less than to live by our ideals. For without liberty for all, there can be liberty for none. It’s the Golden Rule all over again.

As Eisenhower understood 50 years ago, cultural understanding is the starting point. We must all learn each other’s cultures; learning what each loves and what each hates.

As we learn about each other, we will get beyond seeing our enemy as an icon of evil. As we learn about each other, we will begin to see into the heart of our enemy. As we learn about each other, we will discover our common oneness. As we learn about each other, our enemy will become our friend.

There are already many stories of our common oneness, and of enemies becoming friends.

There is the story of Neve Shalom - Wahat al-Salam, an Israeli community in which Jews and Moslems live in peace.

There is the story of the Compassionate Listening Project, so successful in opening the hearts of Israelis and Palestinians to each other and allowing healing to take place

There is last week’s story at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where Muslims and Jews gathered together to commemorate Jewish suffering under the Nazis.

There is Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima, showing us the human side of our enemy, allowing us to share in their loves and hopes and dreams, in the desperate reality of their situation, in their brutality, and in their compassion. We and the Japanese have now been friends for 50 years.

**********

We cannot know what events outside our control will bring.

But we can choose how we will act.

Let us always act for peace.

Let us always seek out opportunities for increasing human understanding, empathy and compassion.

Let us continue to oppose the forces that divide us, always doing so with understanding, empathy and compassion.

Let Freedom Ring.

Copyright © 2006. Stan Stahl, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

Thanksgiving, 2006

2006-11-23T00:00:00.000-08:00

The third phase of America’s culture wars has begun. As in phases one and two, the religious right and the secular left will continue to battle for what each believes is the soul of America. But in this new third phase, we are already seeing more battlegrounds opening up.

As this third phase of America’s culture wars commences, we are seeing the Democratic party pulled between their liberal left and their more pragmatic center. Republicans as well are being pulled between their fundamentalist Christian base and their more tolerant wing.

Under attack by intelligent designers, scientists have launched a counter-attack. Scientists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have called attention to the evils of fundamentalist beliefs of all kind. They see blind faith—faith in contradiction to the empirical evidence that science provides—as the great moral challenge of our time. Blind faith, they argue, leads directly to suicide bombers. And they hold every person of faith accountable. To them, like to George W., “You’re either for us or against us.”

We see cultural fragmentation occurring everywhere we look. Evangelical Christians are being torn between the Jesus of Jim Wallis and the Jesus of James Dobson. Jews have always been split over Israel and, as tension in the Middle East continues, this split is likely to grow wider.

Cultural chaos is our most likely future. But, as the Chinese discovered at the dawn of writing, in chaos lies not only danger, but also opportunity.

As Phase 3 of the culture wars heats up, there is now the opportunity for a new center to emerge. Unlike the wedge politics—designed to separate Americans into extremist camps—which characterized Phase two of the culture wars, this next phase is an opportunity to unite the majority center around basic American values of mutual tolerance and respect.

And unless we succeed in doing so, the danger is likely to be grave. Unless we unite the center—both in America and throughout the world—we put in jeopardy humankind’s very future on this planet.

***********

Even as a secular Jew, I’ve learned to appreciate the wisdom in the ancient texts of our species. Written down during a period of earlier chaos, they reflect an appreciation of the human spirit, both those things that divide us but also those things that connect us … one human to another.

One of those pieces of wisdom is the concept expressed by Jesus that “My Father’s mansion has many rooms.”

I don’t pretend to know all of the theological ins and outs of this seemingly simple statement, so for me, I just think about all the rooms in the human universe as places where we can live our lives. That’s the Mansion—this human universe.

There is an entire wing of the Mansion where Christians can live inside their faiths, another for Moslems, a third for Buddhists, another for Jews, and so on, through all the religions of mankind. There are rooms for capitalists and communists, gays and straights, scientists and mystics, Christian evangelists believing in evolution, Jews opposed to the State of Israel, even atheists and agnostics. In the Mansion, pretty much anything is possible.

All you need is the price of admission.

The price of admission to the Mansion … it’s something we can all afford. All we have to do to gain access to the Mansion is live our lives in accord with another piece of wisdom from “the ancients.”

Every religion on Earth places the same price of admission to the Mansion. It’s called the Golden Rule.

Not one of you is a believer until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.
Hadith, Islam

The Golden Rule is even finding its way into science as evolutionary anthropologists are studying the forces that shape the evolution of cultures. They are discovering that the Golden Rule can have strong survival value to a culture that practices it.

***********

So it seems to me that, we, the people, can resolve the culture wars by following the dictates of our own belief system, whether faith-based or secular. We just have to apply the golden rule.

It seems to me only reasonable that I have the right to decide for myself what rooms I want to hang out in. So, if I want this right for me, by the Golden Rule, I must grant you the same right. Since I don’t want you telling me what to do, I can’t tell you what to do.

If others see different truths in their rooms, it doesn’t mean one’s wrong and the other’s right. It means that here is an opportunity to learn from each other, an opportunity to get to know more of this divine Mansion we live in, an opportunity to enhance the miracle of our existence.

And, as the founders understood, when we do learn from each other, when we share the truths we find in the Mansion, that it is in these magical moments that we secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.

It is this spirit that the Pilgrims brought to America in the Mayflower Compact when they committed to each other a civil body politic, the magic of win-win-win.

This is the spirit of liberty that can bring forth a new center in American politics, a center dedicated to working together with our hearts and our passions, applying our collected knowledge and wisdom to the great tasks that lie ahead of us … to heal the sick, to raise the poor, to put an end to war, and to protect the planet.

Thank you to all who have come before, on whose shoulders we stand, for securing the blessings of liberty to us. May our wisdom and spirit be up to the task of securing these blessings for our children and our children’s children.

Let Freedom Ring.

Copyright © 2006. Stan Stahl. All Rights Reserved.

September 11, 2006

2006-09-11T00:00:00.000-07:00

These are the times that try men’s souls.
Thomas Paine
December 23, 1776

On October 13, 1998, less than five years before 9/11, I landed in Dubai, one of five Kingdoms making up the United Arab Emirates. I was in Dubai to teach a Y2K management seminar. I had decided to go because – as a secular American Jew – I could not pass up the opportunity to explore this most foreign of all worlds.

My first meaningful experience occurred in the Dubai airport. I was on the lower level waiting for my luggage when my attention was drawn to a traditionally dressed Arab man coming down the escalator. As he came down the escalator I could see the beam in his eyes. At the bottom were his wife and two children, eyes beaming back. When he got to the bottom they joyously hugged and kissed.

That moment taught me a truth, that Arabs — in their hearts — were the same as the rest of us. Whatever they might think about Americans or Jews, they had hearts that could love. I continued to see this truth throughout my trip. The Arabs I met, despite the wide political gulf between us, were the same kind of human as we were. Only the direction of our hearts separated us.

It seems to me on this fifth anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities that this truth — that we are all the same except for where we direct our hearts — can help guide us in the ‘war on terrorism.’

I’ve been thinking about the Arabs I met in Dubai in the aftermath of the recent Israel – Hezbollah war. Several newspapers ran articles about how Hezbollah went into bombed Lebanese communities with medical supplies, shelter, food and other necessities.

I wonder if any of the Arabs I met had family or friends in Southern Lebanon and if they did, did the war and its aftermath turn their hearts away from Israel and America and towards Hezbollah. I wonder what the accounting is like? How many Hezbollah terrorists were killed? How many Lebanese who were neutral before the war are now terrorists? How many are now going to protect Hezbollah when the UN Army comes looking? How many enemies did we create?

We must aggressively protect ourselves from terrorists. That much is obvious. The Constitution establishes providing for the common defense as a responsibility of Government and protecting us from terrorists is the least that our Government can do in defending us.

But protecting us from terrorists is simply not adequate. If Americans are to be safe, we must live in a world where terrorists are few and far between, where terrorist attacks are infrequent and do little damage, a world in which terrorism declines and terrorists whither away.

This is the ultimate challenge of the war on terrorism. While protecting ourselves from terrorist attacks, we must also win the battle for the hearts and minds of the people. If we don’t, then the ranks of the terrorists will inevitably rise.

Unless we pay attention to slowing down the supply of new terrorists, we will always be spending more just to protect ourselves from current threats. Like the red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, we will have to keep running faster just to stay in the same place.

As actual weapons of mass destruction come into the hands of our enemies, the only certain way to increase America’s security is to dry up the supply of new terrorists. And the only way to do this is to open our hearts and minds to those who might otherwise become terrorists.

Nothing is sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self Reliance

There is a small community in Israel, Neve Shalom ~ Wahat al-Salam. The words mean Oasis of Peace in Hebrew and Arabic. Neve Shalom ~ Wahat al-Salam — Oasis of Peace — was founded in the early 1970s on land originally leased from an adjacent Monastery. Fifty families – half Jewish, half Arab –live in the village in peace.

People in Neve Shalom ~ Wahat al-Salam live together in peace not because they all believe the same way about, for example, the recent Israel-Hezbollah war. On the contrary. They live together in peace in spite of the fact that they believe differently — very differently — about the war.

Residents of Neve Shalom ~ Wahat al-Salam believe differently about most aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But they share a belief in not letting their differences get in the way of the peaceful community they are determined to grow. They respect the integrity of each others’ minds. And they have learned to open their hearts to each other.

Neve Shalom ~ Wahat al-Salam held together in the recent Israel – Hezbollah war. The community gathered together and discussed what was going on. They poured out their feelings to each other. And when it was necessary, they mourned together the loss of a friend or loved one.

It seems obvious to me that America’s interests in the Middle East would be well served if there were 1,000 – or even 10,000 – Neve Shalom ~ Wahat al-Salams scattered across the Middle East, with new ones forming every day.

Neve Shalom ~ Wahat al-Salams — Oases of Peace – places full of honey, where people of all beliefs purposefully live together because they share a common objective of peace. How keeping with the spirit of America, free people living together cooperatively, they and their families reaping the blessings of liberty.

Oasis of Peace is just one of what must be a zillion possibilities for peaceful cooperation. Another example is the Compassionate Listening Project which, since its founding in 1990, has opened the hearts of tens of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians. Since the war, Lebanese and Israeli bloggers have for the first time begun communicating with each other. Hearts and minds coming into peaceful synchrony.

If America were to commit to growing more Neve Shalom ~ Wahat al-Salams, to opening more Israeli and Palestinian hearts, to increasing respect for the integrity of everyone’s mind, to encouraging more dialogue and communication of all kinds … If America were to commit to this, we could turn the Middle East into an Oasis of Peace.

What could be more American than this? Combining our love of freedom with the pragmatic need to keep people from turning to terrorism, America could be an inspiration to the world. America could become, in the words of Jefferson, the best hope of mankind.

All it will take is that we live our ideals.

Nothing less can take away the pain of that terrible day five years ago.

Nothing less will honor the memory of those who died on that terrible day.

Let Freedom Ring.

Copyright © 2006. Stan Stahl, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

Independence Day, 2006

2006-07-04T00:00:00.000-07:00

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Declaration of Independence
July 4, 1776

July 1, 1776 on a hot and humid Philadelphia summer day, John Adams of Massachusetts was locked in debate with Pennsylvania’s John Dickinson over whether the 13 American colonies should declare their independence from Great Britain.

Dickinson was the leader of the Pennsylvania delegation. He was not opposed to independence, but felt we needed to do more to reconcile with the King. He argued that to proceed with a declaration of independence would be “to brave the storm in a skiff made of paper.”

Adams would have none of it. He had become convinced of the necessity of independence fifteen months earlier when British troops had fired on colonists at Lexington and Concord in the “shot heard round the world.” In the intervening months he had seen how the Crown had ignored several entreaties by the colonists to settle matters amicably. He had seen the British fleet in Boston harbor and he had seen British ships attempt to sail up the Delaware River to attack Philadelphia. To Adams, reconciliation was not possible.

In one of Abigail Adams’ letters to her husband she had offered some favorite lines of Shakespeare:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.
Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat.
And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

This was Adams frame of mind as he rose from his seat to answer Dickinson. His message was strong and it was clear: “We are in the very midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world.”

The revolution continues today. The tide of 1776 is once again poised at the flood. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are under attack, from enemies without and modern-day Tories within.

America must secure our safety in a world containing Al-Quada, an aggressive Iran, and an antagonistic North Korea.

And we must secure our liberties from extremists, both those on the far religious right who seek to impose their version of the Christian God on us all and those on the far radical left who seek only to tear us down, not bring us together.

While securing our safety requires a strong defense, it is no more sufficient today than it was in 1776. We won our independence not only by the force of our arms, but by the inspiration of our vision. It is a vision that continues to inspire us today.

The American vision is the vision of freedom, the vision of hope, the vision of justice, the vision of peace.

The American vision is the vision of the Declaration, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The American vision is the vision of John Adams, There must be decency and respect … for persons of every rank, or we are undone. In a popular government, this is our only way.

The American vision is the vision of the Preamble, We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.

The American vision is the vision of Lincoln, with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in … to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations, a vision that Government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the Earth.

The American vision is the vision of Martin Luther King, Jr, we will transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

The American vision is the vision of Thomas Paine, the cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind.

The American vision is a vision of deep spiritual and moral values, of values that find their origins in the common religious heritage of all humankind, of values that speak to the deepest yearnings of our soul.

Ultimately, it is the American vision that will win the hearts and minds of those who would deny us our liberties. It is only through living the American vision that we will win the elections that will secure our liberties from those who wish to impose their views of the world on us. And it is only through living our vision that, slowly, over time, we can even turn the sons and daughters of our most antagonistic enemies into our friends.

In February 1776, John Adams wrote to Abigail a phrase that George Washington would also often use: “We cannot ensure success, but we can deserve it.” The statement is as true for us as it was for them.

In signing the Declaration of Independence, prepared “to brave the storm in a skiff made of paper,” Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island, who suffered from Palsy, is said to have observed: “My hand trembles, but my heart does not.”

Let Freedom Ring.

© Copyright 2006. Stan Stahl. All Rights Reserved.