Changes Unseen

Hopes For The New President
Rev. David Bryce
Hastings – February 22, 2009

Today, George Washington’s birthday, I will speak to both the Constitutional and the Unitarian Universalist principles that I hope will guide the new administration.

READING:

Selections from Let America Be America Again, By Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.

Let it be the dream it used to be.

Let it be the pioneer on the plain

seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--

Let it be that great strong land of love

where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme

That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,

But opportunity is real, and life is free,

Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,

Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

…I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream

In the Old World while still a serf of kings,

Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,

That even yet its mighty daring sings

In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned

That's made America the land it has become.

O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas

In search of what I meant to be my home--

For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,

And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,

And torn from Black Africa's strand I came

To build a "homeland of the free."

…

O, let America be America again--

The land that never has been yet--

And yet must be--the land where every man is free.

…

O, yes,

I say it plain,

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath--

America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,

The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,

We, the people, must redeem

The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

The mountains and the endless plain--

All, all the stretch of these great green states--

And make America again!

SERMON

Good Morning.

Today is George Washington’s birthday. He was born on Feb. 22, 1732 (except that it was Feb. 11, 1731, O.S.). Britain, and therefore its colonies in North America adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, twenty years later. I am now done with the calendrical discussion for today.

I am taking the opportunity of the celebration of the birth of our first President to speak to my hopes for our new President, which is really a way of saying, my hopes for our nation under this new administration.

In the Enlightenment a new philosophy, what we call Liberalism, developed based upon Humanism, the focus on humanity and this world rather than God and the world hereafter.

This philosophy can be capsulized by saying that each person is of inherent value and that there is around each person a sphere of action that no one--not another person, nor religious institutions, nor the state, nor a corporation--may legitimately interfere with. This philosophy of liberalism insisted upon the right of individual conscience. Individuals then come together to form societies and other groupings which have only the authority and power granted to them by the individuals who form them, and those individuals are n equal covenant with ne another.

Unitarian Universalism is a religious manifestation (not the manifestation, but a manifestation) of this philosophy. The United States of America is a political and social manifestation of this philosophy.

The Puritan movement, of which we are the direct lineal religious descendants, saw their congregations as based on just this action, individuals joining together in covenant with one another.

I am a person who believes deeply in the ideals that are expressed in our Unitarian Universalist Statement of Principles and Purposes. I believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person; and I believe that we human beings need to act on that belief. Without that belief any crime against humanity can be justified. Note that the Principle speaks of every person; not some people, not those people who are part of our religious movement, not those people who are part of our nation or our culture, but every person.

Neither Unitarian Universalism nor the United States of America—nor any religious movement nor any nation—can or ever will be perfect. We cannot expect absolute adherence to any principles or ideals. But we can expect that there will be no gross violations of those principles or ideals. Both Unitarian Universalism and America have at times betrayed themselves and others in their past behavior. Unfortunately in recent years our nation has actively worked to betray its own ideals.

I am an ardent American patriot. I mean by that that I am an ardent believer in Liberalism and in the liberal philosophy of human rights that shaped the beliefs of our founders and that gave form through them to our democratic republic, a nation founded, as they said, on a belief “that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights”.

Because I am an ardent patriot in that sense, that belief in loyalty to the principles undergirding our nation rather than to the selfish interests of our nation--that belief that those principles apply to all people whether citizens of the United States or not and wherever in the world they may live--because of that belief, I have been a sadly disappointed patriot throughout most of my life. And I have found myself opposing many policies of my own government throughout most of my life.

I have said that no nation is or can be perfect, but we have declared ourselves to be something special and different, we have declared ourselves to be a nation that upholds human rights and dignity; and so we have a special obligation to strive to live up to that high standard. And yet throughout our history we have violated it. I need not run through a litany of those betrayals, of our gross failures to live up to our own ideals. We too often allow our passions—fear and anger especially—to cause us to violate our own basic principles; we too often allow them to cause us to ignore the rights of our fellow human beings; we too often allow them to cause us to be the monsters that we claim to oppose.

Within the past eight days there have been a number of news articles that highlight that betrayal:

From the New York Times, an Associated Press story dated February 14. “Former Gitmo Guard Recalls Abuse, Climate of Fear”. “Army Pvt. Brandon Neely was scared when he took Guantanamo’s first shackled detainee off a bus. Told to expect vicious terrorists, he grabbed a trembling, elderly detainee and ground his face into the cement—the first of a range of humiliations he says he participated in and witnessed as the prison was opened for business…as Neely put it in an interview with the Associated Press this week, “the stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong”. “Neely…describes a litany of cruel treatment by his fellow soldiers, including beatings and humiliations he said were intended only to deliver physical or psychological pain.” He does say that things improved after the Red Cross visited the prison.

From the BBC News February 17: “Anti-terror tactics ‘weaken law.’” “The International Commission of Jurists said…that the UK and US had actively undermined international law by their actions. It concluded that many measures introduced to fight terrorism were illegal and counter-productive” and called upon the Obama Administration to “renounce the use of torture and other proscribed interrogation techniques, extraordinary renditions, and secret and prolonged detention without charge or trial”.

How shameful that this needs to be said to us.

On the BBC website yesterday there was a report under the heading “Ridge: We were wrong to torture” that, Tom Ridge, the former Secretary of Homeland Security, had told the BBC that the ICJ’s report on extended detention and torture were justified. I am glad whenever someone recognizes the error of their ways, admits they were wrong, repents and changes their behavior. But I am still baffled as to how a President of the United States and many in the upper echelons of his Administration could fail to recognize the self evident truth that people have unalienable rights.

From the New York Times, February 18, an editorial calling for just treatment of Maher Arar describes how this Canadian citizen was picked up at Kennedy airport while transferring planes to go on to Canada after a family vacation. I quote: “He was held in solitary confinement and subjected to harsh questioning before being sent to Syria. He was tortured there and imprisoned for early a year in an underground cell the size of a grave until the Syrians finally let him go”. The Canadian government reviewed his case and concluded that he had no ties to terrorism. They made some amends to him and Prime Minister Stephen Harper asked the Bush administration to acknowledge “inappropriate conduct” towards Mr. Arar.

In our Declaration of independence among the reasons given for the declaration were charges against King George:

“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences”.

We have betrayed ourselves.

My hopes for the new administration were that it would bring a new dawn of respect for Human Rights, for the basic philosophy of Liberalism upon which this nation is founded. But just thirty three days into the new Administration I am already a deeply disappointed patriot.

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, has argued against opening up the court case of Mr. Arar—and other cases like it—on the grounds of national security. Mr. Arar knows that he was subject to rendition and torture; I know; the world knows. This is not to protect national security, it is to protect against national embarrassment.

And in the past few days, again quoting the New York Times, Secretary of State Clinton, “has sidelined human rights on this trip [to China--DB], saying she does not want the topic to interfere with central issues like climate change or the economic crisis”.

From a practical point of view, it is never the right time to speak for human rights. The economy is in decline so we cannot harm our relations with the Chinese; when the economy is at bottom that will still be true. And when the economy is on the upswing we will need to refrain from damaging the recovery. And when the economy is back in boom times, we will be so intertwined with other economies that it would do us harm to focus on human rights. From a pragmatic perspective, it is never the right time to talk about human rights.

That is the attitude that Dr. Martin Luther King responded to in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail. He was being told by the powers that be to wait, because the time was not right to press forward as he was doing. His response, if I may summarize it, was “the right time to stand for justice is always now”.

Perhaps Secretary Clinton and President Obama should enter into the cells where torture is taking place and speak to those there, saying to them between their screams, “we would love to speak up for you, but now is not the right time”.

Let America be America again.

I had hoped that this administration would work to finally build a society of equality, and of respect for the equal rights for all regardless of who they are, where they were born, what nation they are citizens of. It clearly will not.

And so we must do it ourselves.

Let us finally build a nation where every child attends a good school, where class and neighborhood no longer determine how much money we spend on a child’s education.

Let us build a nation where the probability of being arrested for a crime, or sentenced to prison, or sentenced to death is not dependent upon the color of your skin.

In International relations, let us treat all other nations with respect. Let us stand for freedom and democracy rather than self interest. Let us set a higher priority on human rights than on trade or money.

Let us as a nation be a living exemplar of the philosophy of Liberalism that shines in both our religious faith and in the documents of our political founding. Let us as a nation become what we could be: the beacon light of freedom and human rights in a world too often sunk in despotism.

In the words of Langston Hughes