Now is the time to hang together

There is no better time than this Fourth of July week to reflect on where we stand as a country. Happy birthday to us. It is 242 years since 56 men meeting in Philadelphia debated, considered and agreed to a “Declaration of Independence.” The last clause of the last sentence above their signatures reads:

“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

That is how the Declaration ends, with a pledge to each other and a repeated echo of “our” of their most important possessions committed to the group.

We like our history to be striking, to drip with melodrama. Alas, the best, punchiest vignettes are fables, untrue. John Hancock signed in private, alone with one other man. He did not say “We must be unanimous. There must be no pulling different ways. We must all hang together.” Benjamin Franklin was not there to respond “Yes, we must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

The point is not that the story is not true, is not historical. Legends are the stories we want to believe are true. Over generations, they become a history that we create. It might not be based on facts, but our present day reciting of these never happened tales is support for making the story we tell today true.

So, are we going to all hang together or “assuredly hang separately,” as we want Franklin to have said?

Will we be unanimous, as we say Hancock said we must?

Last week, our present moment, ended with people as sharply divided as ever. That is not good. We are struggling with each other.

Now, more than ever, we need to reconcile ourselves to each other, despite our differences of beliefs and biases.

Everyone seems frustrated, but our frustrations are not the same and are with our sisters and brothers. We are nowhere near together. It seems the only thing that unites us are our divisions.

This is how the Declaration begins: “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people … .”

“Unanimous.” “Necessary for one people.” Without the adrenal rush of taking on the British Empire, do we have the ability to come together as one people?

Being a citizen is really important and being a patriot is good, but coming together as Americans is the hardest and most needed task before every single one of us. We can complain that our neighbors are poor citizens or grouse that so-and-so is unpatriotic, but we are all Americans.

None of us can fail at that. Yet we want to see “us” as good Americans and “them” as bad Americans. That is a recipe for disaster. That is the situation we are in. It is the stuck of which we have to get out.

We are good at getting angry and excel at being righteous, but the productive path is climbing uphill to civility, to respectful discourse. Yes, we will disagree. We are in a phase of passionate disagreement. We are excelling at yelling at each other. We do a great job of not listening. We are not, as Nancy Pearl notes, nearly empathetic enough.

Either we weave the fabric of America into one garment or there is no country. All our experiences, histories, stories and myths are sewn into one quilt that covers us all. We share one bed of history. If everyone is not in it, if the quilt does not cover us all, then there is no common culture, story and country.

We don’t have to agree on the facts. We must agree that we want to be under that cloth together. Whether covered by a quilt or represented by the flag, if it is not all of us together the nation is in deep trouble.

We must be all under this one flag. Yes, many of us are different, but none of us are better Americans.

Either we are Americans together or we are nothing. If we see ourselves as separate, if we see other Americans as separate, and cannot resolve that, it will be game over. If we don’t believe in “our lives” as a country, we cannot pledge “our sacred honor” to each other. We will want to live separate lives in separate countries. We will end up hanging each other.

Right now that is a very real possibility. Only as a collective are we able to take the actions that will get us to hang together.