Many years ago, when ships navigated the waters of the world without modern technology – they looked heavenward, Ship Captains looked to the stars to figure out where they were, where they were going, and how to get back home again.
At the founding of our nation, Thomas Jefferson wrote these words in The Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal. That they are endowed, by their creator, with certain inalienable rights. That among those rights were life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Knowingly casting who we wanted to be – as a nation, as a people – high up into the night’s sky.
And while those words did not – in any way – guarantee smooth sailing, for this country was and still is wrought with conflict of race, religion, skin color, sexual orientation – those words became a focal point. A goal. Far-flung up to the highest point in the heavens and even though potentially unreachable – nevertheless was a place our country could cast it’s gaze when it felt like it was shifting too far in any given direction. Or if it was feeling lost, off course.
It’s in THOSE WORDS we find our truth once declared before God and the foundations of this earth, as well as a challenge to the greatest empire the world had ever seen as well as their king.
Our veritas, our truth.
The truth is not in the eye of the beholder, that’s a fool’s statement, words of a moral relativist. The truth never moves. It is constant. A truth is eternal. It may get covered up. Clouds may pass over – blinding us from the light of truth – but it cannot remove that star, that truth, from being. It is still there shining down regardless of whatever storm blows up obstructing its light.
Now, there may be those who wish to cloud up our skies to keep us from seeing it. There are pedants who strike at the hand that wrote those words demanding his name be eradicated from history’s texts. But in doing so they risk their own eradication as much as those that cloud up the skies do. Their purist arguments are often reductive.
Everything today feels wrong because it is. This throwing out of illegal immigrants without rational. This sudden movement shift to the right. This purist ‘America first’ mentality which harkens back to darker days of the early 20th century. This is all obfuscation. Donald Trump and his ilk, as well as his supporters, are nothing more than a storm that’s blown up.
As Americans, we need to look up and cast our gaze back upon our truth. Then and only then, will we begin to navigate these choppy and suddenly unsafe waters we sail today. We are off course. We are not living up to who WE said we were. And we do so, to our own peril. Regardless of where you stand politically. We have denied ourselves of OUR Truth. No immigrant, nor a terrorist, nor foreign power can remove that truth from us. That’s something only we can do. Something we’re doing to ourselves, right now.
And if we’re not careful, we’ll run her aground. Look up, America. Get your bearings. Get your sea legs back. Get YOUR TRUTH, BACK!
Semper Avanti.