For most of my most recent past, I have been hearing politicians define America in increasingly shrinking terms. They talk about how we can't do this or that; how some of us are better than the rest of us. They talk down instead of up.
For most of that past, these talkers have been Republicans - the spokesmen, paid or otherwise, for the few, the powerful and the ones with an investment in fear. Their speeches have dumbed down the concept of true exceptionalism into unexceptional platitudes, and I like many others have often felt constrained and frustrated by limitations of what is politically possible.
But then, yesterday, President Obama spoke at Selma, Ala., and he provided an explanation for why America truly is exceptional that stands in stark contrast to limited view of those others. It was a better expression of love of country than the words of professional patriots who continually mock and deride him.
If you're unfamiliar with the speech, follow beyond the Golden Curlicue to discover why today is different from yesterday, and why I feel more patriotic now than I have in a long, long time.
Like Lincoln speaking at Gettysburg, Obama gave a speech that rose far above the purpose for his speech.
Obama was there to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the marches on Selma; it was altogether fitting and proper that he should do this, of course. Selma was a great event in the advance of universal civil rights. But just as Lincoln could have just said "a few appropriate" remarks to dedicate the national cemetery at Gettysburg, Obama chose to go far and above what a president might be expected to say at such an event. Like Lincoln, Obama chose to talk about a great many things that have been unsaid for too long in this country, and to give heft and substance to what have been inchoate thoughts among progressives.
The comparison to Lincoln may be jarring to a few, jaded folk. But in their cynicism they have forgotten that it is not for nothing that Obama honors and reveres Lincoln. Lincoln started his speech by acknowledging the acts of the soldiers who fought and fell at Gettysburg, and so did Obama in talking about the marchers who fell on the Pettus Bridge:
We gather here to celebrate them. We gather here to honor the courage of ordinary Americans willing to endure billy clubs and the chastening rod; tear gas and the trampling hoof; men and women who despite the gush of blood and splintered bone would stay true to their North Star and keep marching towards justice.
But after honoring the foot soldiers, Lincoln went further in his speech, quickly expressing how the actions of a few people over two days in July, 1863, were part of an enlargement of an American dream that had been forgotten during the Secession crisis. Obama did a similar thing yesterday, with words that eerily mirror Lincoln's. The 16th president said the the "brave men, living and dead, who struggled" over the fields of Gettysburg "have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract." Yesterday, the 44th president said of those at Selma:
What they did here will reverberate through the ages. Not because the change they won was preordained; not because their victory was complete; but because they proved that nonviolent change is possible, that love and hope can conquer hate.
To be sure, Lincoln spoke far fewer words than Obama did yesterday, and the genius of the Gettysburg Address is in its brevity and concision. But Lincoln was speaking for a nation only four score or so years old; Obama had to speak for a nation that for more than a century and a half has been mired in the same old muck, and imprisoned by the same old rhetoric that has served to divide our nation into tribes who are then set upon one another.
That, Obama said yesterday, is why Selma was important and why he chose to make it an occasion for an important speech:
That’s why Selma is not some outlier in the American experience. That’s why it’s not a museum or a static monument to behold from a distance. It is instead the manifestation of a creed written into our founding documents: “We the People…in order to form a more perfect union.” “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
These are not just words. They’re a living thing, a call to action, a roadmap for citizenship and an insistence in the capacity of free men and women to shape our own destiny. For founders like Franklin and Jefferson, for leaders like Lincoln and FDR, the success of our experiment in self-government rested on engaging all of our citizens in this work. And that’s what we celebrate here in Selma. That’s what this movement was all about, one leg in our long journey toward freedom.
Obama said more things, and I am not going to deprive those of you who might read this diary a chance to add your own, favorite lines. But the lines that spoke to me loudest, the one which most gave me hope for a future without hopelessness, was this:
For we were born of change. We broke the old aristocracies, declaring ourselves entitled not by bloodline, but endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. We secure our rights and responsibilities through a system of self-government, of and by and for the people. That’s why we argue and fight with so much passion and conviction -- because we know our efforts matter. We know America is what we make of it.
I know Obama's haters, naysayers and detractors will pick this speech apart, and try to return my mood to the status quo. That don't bother me none - because they said the same about Lincoln, too. And today, those words, like the words Martin Luther King gave in front of Lincoln's memorial, are carved in stone for the ages to see. And all the claptrap spewed by the few who serve the fewer are lost to the dusts of time.