A Nation Born In A Revolution
In America life, we tend to imagine that there was once a time when America was a free, peaceful country, and people got along great. Most of the time when we get this kind of nostalgia, we think or hope that we can return to that kind of life.
But that dream is a myth. For as much as I like my country, we have been rife with division and violence pretty much since day one. In the run up to the 1800 presidential election - only the third in the country's history - there was widespread violence, huge division, and open hatred. Nothing much has changed.
The kind of dream that we have looks back to a primitive paradise, a garden of Eden without sin and without wrong. But in a secular sense, that world never existed.
We are a nation and a people born out of revolution. It's ingrained in our DNA to think that problems require violence to solve them, and sadly, that has mostly proven true in our history. Other countries stopped the slave trade and emancipated African slaves peacefully. We did it with a war that killed 1/6 of our population. Civil rights for descendants of that slave trade were not fully realized until the violent chaos of the 1960s.
I'm not going to defend violence. We should avoid it whenever we are able. But imagining that we are not who we are is pointless. The country that we share our largest border with, Canada, was essentially created by a committee. We were not. And the beginnings of almost anything tell us how things will progress.
Christianity has consistently taught that without divine intervention, there will be no return to paradise on earth. It's futile to expect one. But studying and pondering our national history gives us clues that despite the day to day rancor that's sometimes part of our lives, we usually work things out in the end. That will happen in this crisis, too. Even when we can't see it.