Archive for March 12th, 2005

2005.03.12

Once Upon a Time in America Part One

Once upon a time in America things were very different than they are today. The freshly minted country was an amalgamation of many cultures and ideas and people. The Founding Fathers knew this and created the Constitution in a way that would include all of these points of view, all of these religions, all of these people. Regardless of anything, you would be an American.

Except if you were Black. Slavery was an important part of the American economy back then. Still, it didn’t sit well with many in the North, who thought you should be able to do your own work. If you needed people to work for you, they thought, you should pay them, not pay for them. Many in the South did not view the situation this way. They knew that they would not be able to profitably run their farms and businesses if they had to pay folks for helping out. Some of these people were more concerned with making as much money as possible, even at the expense of their fellow human beings.

For a long time the American ideal of tolerance toward others prevailed, despite this little slavery issue. Eventually, though, you know it had to get nasty and it did. The result was a bloody, brutal war in which a Republican President did everything in his power to maintain the American Union. Lincoln declared that slavery was wrong and needed to end, that slavery went against the basic human rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

You see, America is not about limiting freedoms for any human. It is for giving them as much freedom as is possible in a complex society and then never taking those freedoms away. This is one of the reasons the Constitutional Amendment abolishing alcohol use was repealed; it took away freedoms, even if that freedom wasn’t necessarily in a person’s best interest.

Slavery was a denial of freedom. It could not be tolerated any more, even in a tolerant society. Even though the Civil War ended slavery, the issue of race was to be trouble even up to today. The American government believed in our freedoms and the American people sacrificed much to keep them and to give them to others who could not help themselves.