On August 4, 2024
© By John Arkelian
“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.” (Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, 1865). How far we have strayed from a society based upon Truth, Compassion, Liberty and Justice! Illustration © 2024 Linda Arkelian.
The United States has been wracked in recent years by the growth of rabid partisanship and by socio-economic and cultural divisions. The nation’s wellspring of strength has traditionally flowed from its general unity, its adherence to longstanding conventions and norms, an informed populace, the division of its government’s executive, legislative, and judicial powers, its history (until lately) of an orderly transfer of power, its free and fair elections, its promise of equal opportunity, its free press, its history of incrementally overcoming its own injustices, and its people’s shared optimistic vision of a better world. Despite all of the political rancor of recent years, the cultish embrace (by too many) of a self-serving demagogue, the alarming blurring of the once clear border between fact and fiction, and a troubling development of a seemingly unbridgeable ‘us versus them’ divide, there is no reason that goodwill, a civil and collegial competition of ideas, a spirit of compromise, and a shared emphasis on the things that unite rather than divide Americans cannot again prevail. That’s going to require wise leadership, a better-informed public (who rely far less than they do now on distorted and inflammatory nonsense on social media), and active participation by more people in public affairs. But one place to start is to reinforce the foundations that have served the country so well for nearly 250 years. Constitutional reform is no instant panacea: it cannot cure sourness of spirit or the selfish and shortsighted impulse to put faction above unity. But it can strengthen the foundations upon which the shared national edifice rests.
See “Curing What Ails America: Fashioning a More Perfect Union Through Constitutional Reform” at: https://artsforum.ca/ideas/in-depth
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