It is vital that American progressives recognize what is fundamentally different between the American of the Bushites and the America that the world has previously seen.
All we get are shades of gray. And to refuse to perceive the differences in the shades is to render one's map of the world irrelevant to the task of moving it forward.
Yes, in the history of this country there's always been ugliness. But by the standards of civilized history -dismal as that history is""America has also been a glowing moment. That glow should be honored.
We ought not see all shades of gray as black, thus disabling ourselves from using the lighter grays to hold the darker grays in check.
One of the Dimensions of Our National Polarization
America's polarization in recent decades has played a key role in breaking down the structures of Wholeness that protect the good in America.
The pulling apart of the two sides signifies the inability of the culture as a whole to integrate the various competing truths about the good and to reconcile the various aspects of our humanity that are in tension. That failure of wholeness facilitates the advance of the forces of division and conflict, rather than harmony and integration. It facilitates, that is, the advance of the forces of evil.
When I do talk radio shows in Bush country, I encounter people on the right who seem unable to condemn their country when it yields to its ruthlessness and greed and self-righteousness and lust for power. To them, God is always on the side of the United States of America.
And then there are those who see America solely in terms of its defects.
This is one aspect of our national polarization.
There's another level -a higher wisdom""that integrates the half-truths of both sides. It is this higher wisdom -which acknowledges both the virtues and the defects""that will best guide our working to advance goodness in America and through America as well.
A Crisis- Literally
Here is America, then, under the sway of forces that damage everything they touch, and that threaten to seize hold of this country's destiny not just for a term of office or two but for the foreseeable future.
Here, then, is a country that has continued to be seen -until recently- by people around the world as a force for goodness, even as warranting Lincoln's characterization of the United States as "the last best hope on earth," now in danger of being a force that carries the world deeper into the domain of war, injustice, deception, lawlessness, and reckless plunder.
No longer, as in Lincoln's day, are we so unique in being a government of the people, for the people, by the people. But much hope still must depend upon this land, if it is to be found anywhere.
Such limited progress as was made in the course of the twentieth century toward a world ruled by right instead of might owed a great deal to the United States' overall role in the world. But now we're tearing down what was built then.
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