Thanks to three major Supreme Court decisions, and the beginning of a rising Southern tide against the Confederate flag, it's hard to believe that it's been less than eight months since the despair and disappointment over the mid-term elections. It's been famously said that the Court follows the election returns. But not during the week just past, in which the Court upheld the terms of the Affordable Care Act, rejected an attempt to weaken the Fair Housing Act and--perhaps most poignantly--declared the constitutionality of marriage equality.
If that doesn't seem remarkable all by itself, consider the fact that the Court's current composition includes a majority of five Justices appointed by Republican presidents. They were not appointed to make progressives happy; very much the opposite was true, then and now. And yet, this past week's miracles occurred because at least one (in the case of the ACA decision, two) of those Justices decided to vote in a manner that frustrated the hopes of those presidents--and the people who voted for them.
How did this happen? And how, after decades of defiance and foolish defensive rhetoric about "heritage," has the Confederate flag become an embarrassment even in the South? The answer lies in the power of three things that have come together over the past several months.
The power of sacrifice--even to the point of death. None of the great causes in the history of our nation, including the creation of our nation itself, came without sacrifice. People no different from you and me have, over the centuries, given of their time, their energy, their intelligence, their emotions, their capital, their labor, and, in far too many cases, their lives. That has been true without a doubt in the struggle to advance civil rights for everyone. Martin Luther King, Jr and the Kennedy brothers were the most prominent martyrs in an era in which many people--black and white--sacrificed everything they had simply to make everyone in American equal in opportunity, dignity, and freedom. Yet it is the blood of those martyrs that become the bricks and mortar of the survivors' determination to ensure that their deaths are not in vain. Barack Obama's presidency is, in and of itself, a testament to that determination.
Sadly, we have in the past few weeks been reminded of the power of tragedy to change even the seemingly unchangeable. The heartbreaking ending of nine lives in a historic South Carolina black church by a white supremacist seems to have breached a firewall of stubbornness over government displays of a flag of treason and racism. How far that should go is a topic I'll save for my next post. But if the senseless loss of those lives means that we will be free of government endorsement of the Confederacy, it will give some lasting meaning to that loss. Being free of that endorsement won't bring back the dead. But, to borrow a phrase, it may help them, and other victims of racism, sleep more easily.
The power of ideas--good ones, that is. I'm sorry if it offends some people, but liberalism survives and thrives even under conservative governments because liberals have better ideas. Winning an election is not the same thing as winning the truth, and, contrary to a statement by some idiot in the last Bush Administration, we can't "create" our own reality. Reality is something all of us create together. But, in the course of that process, good ideas prevail over bad ones no matter who's officially in charge. Marriage equality, for example, is a good idea--and, for that matter, a constitutional one. It's good enough that four liberal Justices can persuade at least one of their conservative colleagues that it is a good idea--and to express that goodness in an opinion that is as moving as it is persuasive. If you have not read it yet, you owe it to yourself to do so.
The only thing that conservatives have on their side is money. They can buy elections. They can rig the media. They can intimidate our political parties. But they can't and will never be able to stop the power of a good idea. Not even on a Court front-loaded with their allies. Just over a decade ago, Karl Rove predicted that opposition to gay marriage would give Republicans a political majority for decades to come. Looks like that Republican majority is going to have to come from somewhere else, Karl. If anywhere.
The power of persistence--without which sacrifice and ideas are both lost. Health care reform, to cite but one example, didn't start with Obama, with Hillary, or even with Medicare. It started with Harry Truman, who made health insurance for all Americans a national cause and a defining principle of the Democratic Party. This has been a decades-long struggle, and it is far from over. It will take more persistence to keep our gains, much less to build on them. It means that ideas and sacrifice are not enough. The willingness to never give up, in the face of anything, is the only thing that allows ideas and sacrifice to prevail.
As long as we have that willingness, and continue to marry it to our ideas and our sacrifices, we can be assured of many more weeks like the one we are celebrating now.
No comments:
Post a Comment