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Just after Iraq voted to approve their new post-Saddam Hussein constitution in Jan 2005, I found myself in the relative safety of Baghdad's Green Zone. Over a cup of Arabic coffee, two Iraqi women, a mother and her daughter, wanted to talk about the document they had just helped approve.
"What will our democracy look like," the mother asked.
"I don't know. It will be your democracy, shaped by your culture," I responded. (I almost added history but given Iraq's past, I reconsidered.)
"What did you think yours would be become?" the daughter inquired.
The best response I could muster was Jefferson's words from the Declaration of Independence as our collective statement of intent. "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
My translator stopped me on the word "unalienable" and asked that I explain its meaning.
An "unalienable right" is something inherently a part of personhood that can neither be taken nor given away was my response.
Tears formed in the mother's eyes as she listened to the translation. Looking down at her coffee, she softly said, "In Iraq, we hope this too someday."
Far more than I that evening, she understood that democracy is as much verb as noun. It is process toward a vision. It was more than a piece of paper for no constitution survives beyond the will of people to defend it and these days a disturbing number of us seem less committed to its defense.
We have had more than our fair share of disturbing never before moments of late. We have never had a president, as Donald Trump did, refuse to concede that he lost an election (if the popular vote rather than the electoral college had been the deciding factor, he would have lost both 2016 and 2020). Bottom line: Most of us did not want him to be our president--twice. Add to this his complicity in attempting to overturn that election by corrupting the count in Georgia, encouraging state legislators to refuse to accept the popular vote in order to seat electors favorable to his wishes, or encouraging his vice president to suspend counting the electoral vote. And perhaps most egregious, we have never had a president with apparent malice aforethought incite, empower, and dispatch a mob to bring a branch of government to full stop while carrying out its constitutionally mandated duties. Since those days, the former president's perpetration of the "Big Lie" continues. Neither court rulings nor recounts of recounts of counts have managed to convince the true believers nor are they likely to do so.
Patriotism is more than standing or saluting when the flag goes by. It is much more than groping the flag as if a "for the moment tryst" as the former president did at CPAC in Feb of 2020. In truth it is far more than paying tribute to a piece of tri-colored cloth. The words to "The Pledge" that really matter is our fidelity "to the republic for which it stands." If we are to really be patriots, there is no cheap grace. If we are to really be patriots, we will commit ourselves to the hard task of working toward what Jefferson advanced, namely the touchstones of freedom, equality, and justice. Shining city on a Hill? Not really. We are not where we should be as a democracy, but we can change.
JOSEPH R. FISCHER
Northumberland
Submitted by Virtual Newsroom