Think About Us

The United States is an evolving idea. If you think about it, it has always been that way.

Lately I have been thinking about the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution. Even if the people who founded this country could not bring themselves to accept the concept that all men were truly equal, Congress eventually got around to it.

Civil Rights are Human Rights

After a bloody civil war, the 14th amendment became part of the law of the land. It opened the way for many things that made a difference in America for the next 150 years.

Great men and women think about the big picture. They consider not only the value of the change they help bring to themselves, but also the way those changes will affect future generations.

My wife and I spent  Jan. 14 on the National Mall, in Washington, D.C.  It's funny, but sandwiched between the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials are two monuments to great thinkers and visionary men of the 20th Century.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the 32nd president of the United States. Rev. Martin Luther King was a human rights activist.  Their monuments capture their times, but they also point toward hopeful images of a world that most people in their times could not have imagined.

Words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Roosevelt was perhaps the greatest disabled person in U.S. history. He was a friend to Helen Keller and a founder of the March of Dimes. He believed this was a country that could harness the strengths of all its people.

Martin Luther King, spoke out for peace, economic justice, and universal opportunity.. Quotes on their Memorial walls speak not of "those people," but of "all people".  They point to the tragedy of empathy and the pain shared by all who suffer injustice.

Words of Martin Luther King

Some people consider the MLK Holiday, just a black holiday. When you think about it, every law enacted in response to the civil rights movement of the past century has been blind to race, ethnicity, age, gender, religion, age, disability and even sexual orientation.

The late congressman George "Mickey" Leland, D-Texas, was fond of saying that "America is a promise. It is not what the country has been or what it is now, but what we all work to make it in the future."

Over months and years, and decades, we continue to work to make it better. I wrote this week that "
Nothing makes a person change their mind about civil rights protections more quickly than reaching a point in life when theirs are violated."

It seems that when one winds up on the receiving end of institutionalized unfairness, their views on right and wrong often begin to resemble those of people who've fought the battles of the habitually or consistently oppressed.

The message I brought away from a day of walking through January's cold and looking at words from men who knew nothing of the 21st Century was that in the end, it is not about "us against them," it is really "all about us."