By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
Hear that glut of foot-tapping martial music and happy little piccolo riffs? See exploding lights in the night sky and smell meat on the bar-b? It’s the 238th birthday of this nation, the one Ben Franklin declared “a Republic, if we can keep it.” Some would say that 238 years is a pretty good run for an evolutionary experiment like representative democracy.
If you’re one of them, you can thank the Constitution of the United States of America — an amazing document that puts the rights of the average citizen at the center of governance — and the generations of patriots that have defended it. And, although we’ve fallen down on the job lately, it should be ingrained in each of us fortunate enough to participate in this level of liberty and prosperity that the price of admission is an ongoing exercise in citizenship and community activism.
Over the decades, there have been a number of moments when that national contract surely seemed to be shaking apart, but so far — knock on wood — the center has held. It held in the dire circumstance of civil war that pitted brother against brother, it navigated the social strife, inequality and corruption of transition to industrialization that birthed the Gilded Age. It held fifty years ago when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 divided the nation and so outraged already disenfranchised, Federalist-leaning Dixiecrats, unwilling to embrace changing social and racial standards, that they permanently aligned with Republicans.