Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

America: the Grand Experiment

Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern
July 2, 2006
Palo Alto, CA

On Tuesday, we celebrate a revolution. Its anniversary is July Fourth, but that’s just a convention. The revolution that officially began with the signing of the Declaration of Independence 230 years ago this July Fourth had to be continued, or else it would have died barely born.

That revolution, that radical step toward freedom, was far from complete. It complained about Americans being under colonial rule, but set up another hierarchy that put some Americans under similar rule by the minority that consisted of white men. The Constitution was still 13 years in the future, and the Bill of Rights, with its radical protections of freedom, wouldn’t begin to be approved until 2 years after that. Even when it was, enslaved men had no vote and the degrading 3/5 of a person they were counted to be did nothing but give more voting power to slaveholders. Women of all races were subject to taxation without representation until 1920. And of course, there was the fact that the colonies broke away by a war, perhaps an unnecessary one. If we had begun our history as a sovereign nation with a nonviolent severing of ourselves from the rule of empire, how much more revolutionary that would have been.

The revolution was still, and is still, in progress. The revolutionary spirit has carried forward into expanded freedom: the end of slavery, the rights of women and African Americans, the right to form unions, the sovereign rights of native American nations. Each of these movements was fought, peacefully or sometimes not so peacefully, in opposition to strong currents backward, such as: the Alien and Sedition Act, the Palmer Raids in which thousands of radicals were rounded up without warrants, the Smith Act that made the speaking of radical ideas a federal offense, the various restrictions on this or that ethnic group when its immigration numbers increased, the internment of Japanese Americans, and the genocide of native Americans. No people in history has been given more power to determine their own liberties, but we have had to fight again and again to expand these liberties and resist the forces that are always seeking to take them away: the forces that say our freedom is too dangerous to be allowed.

Social critic Neil Postman suggests that America can be viewed as an experiment. It is a grand experiment in radical freedom whose end we have not yet seen, and where the struggle and argument and debate continues, must continue. The grand experiment asked these questions, among many others: Can a nation survive if it is made up of independent yet linked states? …if the executive, the president, cannot make decisions without the implicit permission of the separately chosen legislature and courts? … if its people have the right to criticize the government in their speech, in the press, in assemblies of hundreds of thousands? … if it is explicitly forbidden for the people to vote to unify themselves through adoption of a single state religion? … if the police cannot carry out their job of enforcement by searching people’s property or spying on them, unless they first acquire a warrant, that is, without approval from the courts? Can a people with this degree of freedom still be unified and secure?

The founders of our country put all their hopes into the answer, Yes. But that was a long time ago, and the answer is only tentative. The answer of the current administration seems to be no — and the legislature, and the people, seem to agree.

Polls repeatedly demonstrate that if the Bill of Rights were proposed today, it would have a lot of trouble passing. A full thirty percent of the American people have serious reservations about the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment — they would prefer to see more limits on either freedom of speech, the press, assembly, religion, or all of the above. But then, another poll indicates that only about that number know what the Amendment is about. The experiment is not complete. It has worked for 230 years, with advances and setbacks, and not without basic freedoms being questioned again and again. But it could fail tomorrow.

We must insist that the revolution remain alive; we must keep it alive in the same way it came to birth, by the dedicated energy of those who treasure freedom. As Benjamin Rush said when the Constitution was being written, “The American war is over; but this is far from being the case with the American revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the drama is closed.” Many other acts have followed, with crises that came and went, but the final curtain has not come down; the end has not been written. We are the ones who will write this act. Right now it is at another crisis point, one of those moments when the story could go either way, when everything we do weighs towards one resolution toward freedom or another toward repression.

Speaking of acts … One of the biggest assaults we have seen on the freedoms glorified in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution has been the USA PATRIOT Act. Protesting is now a crime: the Patriot Act will empower Secret Service to charge protesters with a new crime of “disrupting major events including political conventions and the Olympics.” Your personal records, such as what books you’ve bought from stores or borrowed from libraries, doctor’s offices, can be obtained without any court oversight, simply because an FBI official has requested them in a “national security letter.”

Another challenge to the freedom envisioned by our founders has been made at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisons. One liberty that was so important that it was put into the original Articles of the Constitution, before even the Bill of Rights was ratified, is habeas corpus: the rule, established centuries earlier with the Magna Carta, that you cannot be locked up by the government unless it gives a court a reason why. You must be accused of a crime, and given the means to defend yourself against the accusation. In Guantanamo, the US government has been holding hundreds of people prisoner in violation of this most basic right for four and a half years. It will not even agree to be governed by military law, even though it claims that these are prisoners of war. There was not so much as a dent in this policy of rounding people up and holding them without charge, access to a lawyer, or public scrutiny, until this week’s Supreme Court ruling. We the public don’t even have the information we need to make decisions, despite the Freedom of Information Act. When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said we hadn’t seen the worst of the photos. Two years later, we still haven’t, because the administration is fighting their release tooth and nail.

And then there are the wiretapping and further infringements on our rights. After the National Security Agency was accused of wiretapping phones without consulting even with the FISA court, Congress began investigating the allegations, but was stopped by an agency who said the information they asked for was classified. What agency? The National Security Agency. The president has admitted to approving the program, but Senator Russ Feingold’s calls to investigate him, not even with the goal of impeachment, but just of censure, met with scorn from the rest of Congress. If you’re an AT&T customer, a complete record of the phone calls you make has been given to the government, again without a warrant. The government is also examining bank statements.

This is not a partisan issue! Congress approved the USA PATRIOT Act by a huge margin: the vote was 357-66 in the House (over 2/3 of the Democrats voted yea, including Representatives Eshoo and Lantos), 98–1 in the Senate (every Democrat but one, including Senators Boxer and Feinstein). A handful of its provisions, the ones that people protested loudly at the time, were not approved as permanent and had to be voted upon again this year; they were approved this year overwhelmingly. I can’t believe I’m about to quote such an awful movie, but there was one good line in Star Wars, Episode III, Revenge of the Sith: when the Senators enthusiastically approve of the advance of empire, Senator Padme observes, “So this is how freedom dies: to thunderous applause.” The pointed reference to events in our own increasingly imperialistic government has not been lost on people on either the right or the left. Our own freedoms were given away with barely a fight from those who are charged with protecting them.

Likewise on the issues of torture and the right to a fair trial. Instead of standing up and saying that the McCain Act was unnecessary because we had already agreed to international laws forbidding torture, Congress revisited the question, may prisoners be tortured? And although its answer was an overwhelming no, a shocking nine Senators went on the record as saying that torture was acceptable. Congress also tried to shelter the executive branch from the requirement of either charging a prisoner or releasing him or her with the Detainee Treatment Act of December 2005: “[N]o court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. ” Only one quarter of the Representatives opposed this bill; not a single Senator did.

As for freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, even with everything the President admitted to and the NSA was accused of, Congress barely blinked until it was a Congressman, accused of a serious crime, whose office was searched by the federal police — who, let us note, did obtain a warrant. If only Congress were half so vigilant when it came to our offices, homes, telephones, bank accounts, and — who knows what the next revelation will bring — medical records?

I say all this not to fill you with despair, but to make the point that we are going to have to be vigilant on our own behalfs, and if our representatives in the government fail to look out for our freedoms, we need to use what freedom remains to us to either demand they change, or get better representatives.

Many religious traditions devote part of every service to confession and contrition. We do not. But it is a practice of reflection that would be useful today. We have done so little as a people. Why has there not been a march on Washington every year since the Patriot Act was passed? Why are we so quiet in response to the drastic attack on our rights? And I want to confess as well that I have done little beyond shake my head and wring my hands. The goal of confession is not absolution — not to be released from guilt for things done or undone. The goal is to change course. To put right what is wrong. To restore the freedom that has been taken away, that we have allowed to be taken away.

So what is it we must do? What can we do?

• See those documents John got for the order of service? They’re ours. Let’s read them. Know what’s in them. Notice when they’re under fire. Don’t be among the millions of Americans who don’t even know what rights the Fourth Amendment guarantees them, or when someone searches your bank records, you’ll have no idea a law has been violated.
• Educate ourselves about the ways these rights are being infringed. Read a summary of the Patriot Act. Read the newspaper. If your newspaper doesn’t have any information about such issues as Guantanamo, read a different one.
• Then share what you’ve learned.
• Take to the streets. If there aren’t any big protests against the restrictions of our freedoms, and I haven’t seen one, go to a small one. If there ins’t a small one, organize one — I’ll help. Or, go to a protest that’s on another issue and leaflet the crowd.
• Bookmark Project Vote Smart, an excellent nonpartisan list of important bills, and keep track of how your representatives vote.
• Tell the people representing us that these freedoms matter, and that we’ll be looking at their record when we go to the polls in November. Then we need to go! And send another letter saying how we voted and why. We should send every such letter to the press as well as our Congressperson and Senators.
• Publicly support officials who do protest on behalf of our rights. They need to know we’re behind them.
• Join organizations that protect our rights.
• Remind everyone you talk to that our nation was founded on these freedoms and that no one will protect them if we don’t speak up for them ourselves.

It is up to us to continue the revolution. Otherwise the grand experiment in radical freedom may end on our watch. It is not enough to be thankful for the revolutionary spirit of 1776 and 1787; we have to strive to keep it alive, because the forces of repression do not rest. As the hero of Ursula LeGuin’s novel The Dispossessed says, “Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin. We can’t stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.” Each Fourth of July, we can be more free than we were the year before, or we can be less free. It depends on us. Tuesday is Independence Day, the day of our freedom — along with our picnics and our fireworks, let us each use that day to do one thing that keeps the revolution alive!