Still Worth Wanting

The idea is still worth wanting

On what Angela is reflecting on as the American 250th — a semiquincentennial or sesquincentennital (yes, really)— anniversary approaches.

For five years I saw America from somewhere else. Two of them were in New Delhi, and the better part of three in Bogotá, in the kind of life the military hands you whether or not you asked for it. Dave wore the uniform; the rest of us packed and unpacked and learned where to buy bread. What I did not expect was how the country would look from that distance. Up close it is weather and traffic and the people who irritate you in the grocery line. From far enough away it stops being any of that and becomes an idea, and you find that people who have never set foot in it are carrying that idea around with them. They were not longing for our highways. They were longing for a sentence somebody wrote down in 1776 and never fully kept.

While we were in New Delhi, the United States held an election, and I learned what it is to watch your own country's politics from inside someone else's. The whole world was paying attention. Not only Indians, though they had plenty to say, but the expatriates from a dozen other countries who had made lives there too. There were evenings when the people around the table knew more about the race than I did, had followed it more closely, held firmer opinions about what it would mean. It was a humbling thing, to be the only American in the room and the least informed person at the table about America. The country I had half tuned out was, to them, news worth staying up for. Not one of them had a vote in it. They cared anyway.

Coming Home

Then we came home, and the contrast was its own kind of education. I had left a country the rest of the world still watches closely and returned to one whose own citizens were quietly giving up on it. Not switching sides. Giving up. There is a difference, and it took me a while to see it. The loud version of our trouble is people shouting at each other across a line, and that at least is a kind of caring. The quiet version, the one I came home to, is exhaustion. People worn down to the point where they decide the whole thing has failed them, and they let go of it. Nobody puts that on a yard sign. It just happens, one tired person at a time.

I understand the temptation, because the people we put in charge make it easy. We watch them, across every party, treat governing as a contest to be won instead of a job to be done. We watch them break faith with the work they were sent to do. It is reasonable to be disgusted. But somewhere in the disgust a substitution slips in that I think we make without noticing. We begin to treat the people running the country as if they were the country. We lose faith in the management and conclude the whole enterprise is bankrupt. It is the oldest confusion there is, mistaking the people holding a thing for the thing itself, and it costs us more than any election ever has.

The Oath

I learned the difference from Dave, though it took me the better part of a marriage to put it into words. The oath he swore was not to a president, and not to a party. It was to the Constitution. He served under commanders in chief he had voted for and commanders in chief he had not, and the oath never once adjusted itself to the election returns. His loyalty ran to the idea the office is meant to serve, never to whoever happened to be sitting in it. I used to file that under military discipline, the sternness of the job. I have come to think it is the cleanest picture of loving a country that I have ever been shown. It is devotion that can survive disappointment, because it was never handed to the people in charge to begin with. You can believe every last one of them is failing and still owe everything to the thing they were sent to serve.

The Thing Itself

That thing has a name I kept circling before I would say it. The Declaration ends with a promise, and the word is exact. Its signers pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to a proposition not one of them had real reason to believe would outlast them. That is the audacious thing at the bottom of this country, and the noise has very nearly let us forget it. A handful of people staked everything on an idea so large it would take generations and a war among ourselves to begin to honor it. And then the people the idea had left out picked it up and held the nation to it anyway, century after century.

It is still happening, and I saw the leading edge of it in a park in Bogotá. A friend of mine used to spend afternoons there, where she had struck up a friendship with a grandmother and her young grandchild. For months it became a kind of standing picnic, the three of them on the grass, though it was always my friend who brought the food. Then one afternoon the grandmother said she had come to say goodbye. She and the child were leaving. They were going to make their way north through the Darién Gap, that stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama that people die crossing, because somewhere on the far side of it was the United States and the life they believed they might be allowed to have there. The signers pledged their lives to the idea on paper. Two and a half centuries later, a grandmother was ready to risk hers, and a child's, on the same bet, while a good many of us born already holding it had quietly stopped bothering to want it.

The Way Back

That is the ache of watching someone reach for the thing you grew up taking for granted. It makes the thing visible again, and it tells you what the thing actually is, because the promise was always two promises folded into one. The promise the country made to us, and the promise we make to one another by choosing to belong to it. The second one is the part that is up to us, and apathy is how it gets broken now. The people in office have done their share of the breaking, heaven knows. But the final break is closer to home. It comes the moment a citizen decides the whole thing is no longer worth caring about.

So this is my plea… Don't let them talk you out of it. Don't let the smallness of the people in power convince you that the country itself is small. The way back is not the door you keep getting offered. It is not picking the other side, and it is not walking off the field. It is older and harder than either. It is remembering that the promise was never theirs to keep on our behalf. It was always ours.

Dave spent a career keeping faith with an idea regardless of who outranked him, because the idea was never the same thing as the people running it. The rest of us are asked for something more modest, and not so different: to keep the promise even now, even tired, even disappointed in nearly everyone we elected to keep it for us. I have stood far enough from this country to see it whole, the way the people still trying to reach it can see it. It is worth wanting.

We came home to it. Let's keep it.