The Soul of America

Find the true Battlefield

Those seeking a battlefield generally “follow the clash of arms.”  But at this moment in history, if you seek the battle for the Soul of America, you will not find it “where ignorant armies class by night.”

Where the tin horns of social media and the incessant search for ratings of competing news networks fight their battles, you will smell the sulfur of fireworks and burned fingers, but you will not be present at the true conflict.

From the beginning, at Valley Forge, amidst the carnage of a war of brothers, at Wounded Knee, at the Ludlow Massacre, as the Black community of Tulsa went up in flames and was rebuilt, Americans have fought to carve a new understanding of government and human worth out of centuries of elite rule and contempt for the “commoner,” and the “other.”

That has been the warriors’ battle for the Soul of America and it is never won—and never lost.  Even when bitterness and enmity seemed victorious our democracy has survived and we continue to struggle to understand our past and renew our future.   

Raw courage and tragic loss have marked this struggle. But fundamentally it has not been a battle of armed forces and unmarked graves. Fundamentally, it was and is a struggle of ideas and a search for unity.  

Again, as is so often right, we turn to Lincoln: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

Tomorrow is the 4th of July.  Two hundred and forty-five years have past since that first intentional act.  The decoration of our independence and our separation from England was forever a promise made by ordinary and extraordinary men and women.  For all these years the best of our people have worked together to build an America worthy of that promise. 

That is the true battlefield for the Soul of America.  In our courtrooms, in university lecture halls, in our churches and temples and at the very center of our homes and families, the struggle continues.  Neither side seeks to impose a “solution.” One side will not win and the other lose.  Both sides learn with and from each other and the battle (call it a journey) goes on, ever more serious and ever more important for our survival. 

We must not let the present turmoil, churned by commercial media for financial gain, replace this “sacred” struggle. We “fight” with ideas.  We fight with the belief that without the battle, there would be no America and no future truly worth the art of living or that makes peace with the final curtain of dying.