COMMENTARY: Living up to American ideals

(RNS) In his wonderful book, “The Ninth,” Harvey Sachs describes Europe in 1824 and Beethoven’s unveiling of his Symphony No. 9. The miracle of the Ninth isn’t just that its composer was deaf, but that Beethoven boldly proclaimed human freedom and brotherhood at a time when both were under attack. With the fall of Napoleon, […]

(RNS) In his wonderful book, “The Ninth,” Harvey Sachs describes Europe in 1824 and Beethoven’s unveiling of his Symphony No. 9.

The miracle of the Ninth isn’t just that its composer was deaf, but that Beethoven boldly proclaimed human freedom and brotherhood at a time when both were under attack.

With the fall of Napoleon, Europe’s monarchs roared back and restored repression on a vast and ugly scale. A repressive Church gladly provided support.


The French-born dream of “liberte, egalite, fraternite” — the dream that had incited American revolutionaries to declare an independence grounded in equality and God-given rights — was being systematically squashed throughout Europe. And yet a solitary musician issued a soaring declaration that “all men will become brothers.”

American freedom has never been a sure thing. Not only did England’s monarch fight hard against it, but every succeeding generation within the new nation has tried to deny freedom to all but a few.

Early laws denied freedom to slaves and limited the rights of women. Each wave of immigrants had to fight through predators waiting to exploit them, previous arrivals who rioted against them, and the harsh reality — as real today as it was in 1824 — that the landed and wealthy will stop at nothing to preserve their unduly large share of the American pie.

If seizing land, buying government and rigging the economy aren’t enough, they will manipulate have-nots into fighting other have-nots.

Immigrants don’t threaten the American economy. The Great Recession started in canyons of greed, abetted by the shredding of regulatory oversight. The collapse of American industries — and resulting implosion of middle-class incomes and countless cities and towns — stemmed from poor managers who put salary-enhancing short-term profits ahead of long-term vitality.

If the brown-skinned threaten anything, it is the delusion that America is a white nation.


Slave owners used that delusion to turn poor whites against blacks once the Civil War was lost, just as light-skinned Northern Europeans used ethnicity against Southern Europeans and Asians, and their Christian apologists shouted against Jews fleeing repression.

Such anti-American behavior is beneath us. Our ideals are nobler than that. Freedom, equality and oneness are values born in eternity. Those brave souls who risked everything to declare independence from English repression had it right.

Yes, they made compromises with slave owners, and we had to fight a Civil War to undo their tragic error. The Declaration of 1776 was made more complete “four score and seven years” later, when our beleaguered president stood on a blood-soaked battlefield and reaffirmed “liberty” and the “proposition that all men are created equal.”

The Declaration made further progress when women’s exclusion from full citizenship was ended, when the military was integrated, when inequality in public education was ruled unconstitutional, and when civil rights became more assertively the law.

Every time an immigrant arrives and seeks the opportunities of freedom and the responsibilities of citizenship, the Declaration of Independence becomes a little truer.

The propertied always fight back, and some have-nots can be lured into doing their bidding. But still, the seekers of freedom, as Beethoven put it, “raise (their) voices in more pleasing and more joyful sounds.”


Some cross deserts, some start new enterprises, some seek education amid the dumbing down. These freedom-seekers believe in America even when many Americans are trashing the country’s ideals in the delusion that America can only be safe when it stops being itself.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His website is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)

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