Morning in America
Morning in America
The Law is King. The ideal stills holds.
TODAY is the final day of the special May subscription rate at The Cottage — 20% of a yearly subscription. I only offer this rate once a year. I hope you’ll sign up before it expires!
I wanted to reach out to you on this historic morning. Today, we woke up in a country where, for the very first time in our nation’s history, a former president has been found guilty by a jury of his peers on thirty-four felony counts.
When I heard the news yesterday, I cried. I’m not entirely sure why. But I had an emotional response to hearing, “guilty. . . guilty. . .guilty.” I never thought that anyone anywhere would ever hold Donald Trump accountable for any of his many misdeeds and crimes.
Instead of trying to analyze my own reaction, I’m just letting it be. It feels oddly good to live in this America, where even a wealthy, privileged, powerful white man can be found guilty in our admittedly imperfect legal system. At the center of that clunky, often unfair, process, there is still the kernel of a great American ideal: The rule of Law is King. (Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776).
And so, on this final May morning, I sit in my backyard in Alexandria, Virginia. Birds are singing, sunlight slants through the garden, dew rises as a faint haze over the flowers. Long ago, when Thomas Paine wrote those words about the law, George Washington owned this land. It was the far edge of one of his large plantations.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, Washington fought for that ideal of law and himself resisted becoming king.
Even while he held people in slavery. Even while his land had once belonged to people who died when strange European diseases infected their tribe.
After he died, some of the people Washington held were legally freed. They settled on this same land — calling it Gum Springs — and they farmed it, built churches, went to school, and lived in modest frame houses. Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers made up a new neighborhood on the borders of the old Mount Vernon estate — all people who embraced things like “soul liberty” and believed that every person had an “inner light.”
Those once enslaved, those still endangered by racism, those discriminated against for their religions — they all clung to the promise that the Law was King, and that, in some way, that law and God’s law of justice and freedom would prevail. They, even more than us, knew that the ideals of freedom and liberty and law were incomplete and applied unevenly. Yet, they pressed on to embody the ideals of both secular and sacred laws of equality and dignity. They trusted that someday the ideals would overtake hypocrisy.
Some of those same families still live in this greater neighborhood. Much of the land was developed into suburbs after WWII and many different people live here now. Yet, the land carries much sorrow. Much hypocrisy. And, oddly, hope. There’s something so American about it.
This morning, I’m not thinking of Donald Trump. I’m thinking of those who lived here before me. I don’t even wonder what they’d think — they’d be grateful that the law eventually catches up with even those who have flaunted and abused it.
Today adds another chapter to the long story of hypocrisy and hope. It is yet another morning in America.
INSPIRATION
We have only begun
to love the earth.
We have only begun
to imagine the fullness of life.
How could we tire of hope?
- so much is in bud.
How can desire fail?
- we have only begun
to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision
how it might be. . .
— Denise Levertov, from “Beginners”
I hope you’ll join me, Robert P. Jones, Kristin Du Mez, and Jemar Tisby as we launch The Convocation, a new collaborative newsletter. We’ll be recording a conversation about yesterday’s verdict and sending it out later today to everyone at The Convocation.
Beautiful story Diana about the history of freed enslaved people near Mt. Vernon. Thank you for giving us hope.
I have served on juries several times and have always found the experience honest, authentic and magical. While I've lost faith in the judicial system, somehow I wish we could get the world to serve on a jury and just talk and think things out.