New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: Freedom's toll

New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: Freedom's tollFreedom's toll

America's dark history sheds light on future greatness

At this point, we have found out more than a few dark things about the American past and the nature of the men who put our great republic together. Some seem to think that the shortcomings of those great men reduce the meaning of the ideas and the impact that they had on the world. I am not one of those critics. There is a primary fact about human beings: great ideas can live and function independent of their source.

That is why it is no major observation to point out that .Thomas Jefferson and so many of the founders of this nation were slaveholders. That they were racists, like most of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, means little to us, though it meant much to all who had to live within the range of their social decisions.

I am not belittling the importance of slavery, the oppression of women, the war on the Indians or the vast dues paid by Mexicans and Asians over the course of our national history. I simply say that the long struggle to purify our social policies of bigotry and favoritism would not have been possible if the idea of a free society had not been put in place by the very men who today come under attack by purportedly "progressive" lightweights.

Thomas Jefferson did not have women or so-called minorities in mind when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. In fact, language that opposed slavery was excised to appease the slaveholders among the Founding Fathers. Even so, those ideas have rung throughout the world since they were written and remade the way in which modern people think about themselves.

Those ideas were not just floating around the world for anyone to pluck from the air. The ideas did not come from Asia, Africa, South America, or Australia - they once were Western. Those who want things to go the way they were in a world free of Western influence should look for something that will satisfy them. They will find slavery, the oppression of women, and the unblinking slaughter of minorities.

From what we can tell, human nature seems to express its fundamental survival instinct in xenophobia. American democracy is an argument against that, which is why every group has had to gain its human recognition in order to struggle for its basic rights. Spouting arguments about "human rights" that are derived from the Declaration of Independence, some will say they should never have had to struggle for anything, and that such unfairness should never exist. That and a few pennies will get you a first class ticket to dreamland.

We should all be proud and happy to live in the United States because ours is a history of increasing human recognition. We are forever moving against our limits and being forced to face our shortcomings. We remain within the orbit of those American dreams, like sword points, that keep pushing us beyond what Mr. Jefferson and his boys thought, but which would not be possible without them.

Originally published on July 3, 2005