Once, back when I was working at a children’s hospital, I heard tell of a mother who had just been confronted with a dark diagnosis and some long, long odds against her child’s survival. One chance in ten, the doctors told her. At best.
The mother shrugged. “Someone makes up the one,” she said.
Months later, to the doctors’ astonishment, her child left the hospital, completely healthy – a walking, talking, laughing little miracle.
It’s not only children who beat the odds. Sometimes, whole countries do. To read America’s history is to discover an extraordinary miracle … the birth, rough childhood, and eventual rise to power and glory of a tough, resilient, unpredictable nation whose odds of survival, 241 years ago this weekend, seemed infinitesimal. Even to those trying hardest to bring her to life.
A fun, fairly true account of those grim days is the film 1776, which most of the old movie stations find a way to show this time of year. Revolution set to music isn’t everyone’s taste, but the film features sharp, witty dialogue and finely-etched portraits of the all-too-human Founders – drawn in large measure from the actual diaries, letters, and sundry scribblings of the men who grappled with destiny and each other, that long, sweltering, fly-infested Philadelphia summer.
“Trying to get a nation started,” Benjamin Franklin says, “against greater odds than a more generous God would have allowed.”
The Almighty’s considerable generosity notwithstanding, 1776 is a blunt reminder of something those who don’t read history tend to ignore: that America’s survival has always hung by a thread. That – at a thousand different moments before and during and after that Revolution – a single wrong decision or turn of circumstance or character could have wrecked the “sweet land of liberty” … and doomed its people to something considerably less prosperous and free.
In other words, as strained as things seem in today’s often vicious political climate – with ISIS looming, North Korea rattling its nuclear sabers, and teeming throngs competing to out-hate the current president – it’s been this bad before. At least this bad. Lots of times.
The good news is: the American Experiment is as durable as ever.
The bad news: it’s also as vulnerable.
The movie serves to remind us of one other uncomfortable truth: Americans have never gotten along very well. We’ve always been as at odds with each other as with people from any other part of the world.
As great a threat as the behemoth British army that summer was the profound distaste those from the northern colonies felt for the South, and vice versa. Hypocrisies abounded: the North was sickened by southern delegates who saw no irony in demanding freedom for themselves while denying it to their slaves. Southerners smirked at Yankees who refused to own slaves but didn’t mind making a fortune selling them. The endless arguments and mutual contempt constantly threatened every effort to declare independence and unite the colonies against a common enemy.
In a day when the cable networks and political websites seethe with accumulated hatreds, it’s sobering to hear the moment in 1776 when Franklin turns on John Adams, who’s ready to chuck the whole idea of American independence over his repulsion at the South’s addiction to slavery.
Adams’ tirades have finally driven the southern delegates from the Congressional meeting hall, and Franklin – founder of the first anti-slavery society on the continent – rises to rebuke him.
“These men,” he says, “no matter how much we disagree with them, are not ribbon clerks to be ordered about. They’re proud, accomplished men, the cream of their colonies – and whether you like it or not, they and the people they represent will be part of this new country you’d hope to create. Either learn to live with them, or pack up and go home – but, in any case, stop acting like a Boston fishwife!”
It needed to be said, and it needs to be remembered, by those of us on every side of the political spectrum who foster delusions of a country made up exclusively of people who embrace our sensibilities and endorse our point of view. America doesn’t work except as a complex, motley mix of competitive visions and contradictory impulses.
That doesn’t mean we don’t stand and fight for our convictions. It does mean we stop short of destroying those who don’t or won’t or can’t share them. Ours is a society grounded in persuasion, not compulsion. It hasn’t always worked that way, but it’s built to work that way.
We agree to disagree. We work to understand those different from ourselves. And e pluribus unum – out of so many, come one.
Watch the news, listen to the radio, read the comments after the op-ed, and you’ll find that for many Americans – like many in the Continental Congress that July – forging that unity is the hardest fact of life in a democracy.
But for Christians, it’s a preview of coming attractions.
“After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb …” Revelation 7:9
No fireworks in heaven. No rockets’ red glare. Just a remarkable array of infinitely different, mismatched people, united only by their hard-bought freedom, and an endless wonder at having beaten the odds.
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