Between You and Me: Remember that bit about pledging our sacred Honor?
By Leah S. Dunaief
“Are you worried about what’s going to happen to our country?”
This question was posed to me by a younger person I know. He was clearly worried by current events, and with good reason. Our nation is facing a number of serious problems, and, in fact, so is most of the rest of the world.
His question made me think back to some of the chaotic times I remember. Polarization is a painful word being used to describe the United States today, but there were other times in my short lifetime when our country was seriously divided.
I have an early memory of signs hanging in our apartment house elevator. “Impeach Truman,” they urged. I don’t think I knew what they meant, but people on the streets were heatedly saying the same thing. I knew Truman was president, but I certainly did not know anything about impeachment, and I had never before heard of Douglas McArthur, who had been relieved of his command in the Far East for disagreeing with Truman over Korean War tactics. That was a time of polarization, and tensions were high, even in my neighborhood of New York City. The Chicago Tribune editorialized, “The American nation has never been in greater danger.”
Our country moved on.
Everyone who was alive in the 60s well remembers the torments of that decade. Both Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, civil rights legislation drove friends apart, the Vietnam War caused endless demonstrations and riots, and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 was a frightful militarized spectacle epitomizing the nation’s divisions and chaos. It seemed our nation was being torn apart. People wondered if the country would survive.
Our country moved on.
There was Watergate in the 70s and a president of the United States was forced to resign. There were long lines at the gas pumps and wild inflation with stagnation and American hostages in Iran.
Our country moved on.
You get the point. Severe problems have always periodically challenged America, our stability and our way of life. There have been those with evil intent and there have been true heroes. We have been challenged regularly, we have come together and we have moved on.
July 4th, we celebrated our independence, and the flag that belongs to all of us. In our small town America, up and down the Island, we paraded together, fire departments and police departments, conservatives and liberals, Blacks and whites and Latinos and Asians, gay and straight, lifers and choicers. We did so as Americans, proud of our nation despite its many faults, recognizing that we can make our country better even as we cheer the exceptionalism that makes immigrants risk and sometimes lose their lives to get here.
If you read through the Declaration of Independence, as I did this past weekend, you will see the values that bind us together. We must not lose, in the struggles to find our way forward today, the respect in the ending sentence:
“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
Let us then start our healing not by putting power over country but by pledging to each other our sacred Honor. That will help unite us, to truly hear each other, and together we can move on. We always have, and together, we always will.
