As we've always believed
On the Moon landing, the Gettysburg Address, and the meaning of an idea like America
Most good things in life are abstract ideas that have real-world consequences. Kindness is an idea, expressed in actions like showing patience with a child or holding a door for a stranger. Curiosity is an idea, exhibited in questions asked and books read.
■ America, too, is an idea -- or, better, a special collection of ideas about individual liberties and limitations on concentrated power. It's an idea documented in the documents of our Founding, and in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and in Coolidge's speech on the 150th anniversary of Independence Day, among many other documents.
■ The landmass we occupy has influenced the idea, but a certain set of borders is only secondary at best to defining the idea. Anyone who doubts this needs only to look at a photo of the first Moon landing. Setting the flag on the Moon wasn't an act of territorial claim.
■ But America, the idea, most certainly went on that extra-terrestrial voyage -- as far away from American borders as any human has ever gone. The idea was there in the courage to try the extraordinary, and to do so in the spirit of all humanity. America, the idea, isn't bound by borders or gravity.
■ Nobody was a more significant author of the Constitution than James Madison, and Madison is on record at the Constitutional Convention itself saying he "wished to maintain the character of liberality which had been professed in all the Constitutions & publications of America. He wished to invite foreigners of merit & republican principles among us. America was indebted to emigrations for her settlement & Prosperity."
■ A lot of people since, and especially today, have attached themselves to a much smaller, much more frightened, much more timid definition of America. They reject that it's an idea, accepting only that it is a place: A set of boundaries best defined by walls and exclusion and even hostility.
■ They're wrong. They would have been wrong on July 3, 1776, when the idea of America already existed -- even in a pre-publication state. And they're wrong now. The sooner we resolve conclusively to believe the same idea of America that has prevailed for a quarter of a millennium, the better.
