{"id":1271,"date":"2003-07-04T17:55:04","date_gmt":"2003-07-04T21:55:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2003\/07\/04\/1271.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:43:24","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:43:24","slug":"another-independence-day-note","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2003\/07\/04\/another-independence-day-note\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Independence Day note"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Your Humble Blogger just read Michael Kazin&#8217;s lengthy and provocative article about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tompaine.com\/feature2.cfm\/ID\/8253\">A Patriotic Left<\/a>. It&#8217;s got quite a bit to chew on, and I suspect I will wind up disagreeing with much of it, once I&#8217;ve got a chance to think about it.\n\n<p>One thing that I like, though, is the sense that the idea of America is a great one. The enactment of that idea has often been monstrous, which has led me and many of us to abandon the idea, at times. A better response is to fight for that idea. Equality, Liberty, and Democracy are not things we were given, once, and have kept. They are goals that never will be fully reached. If the goals are good in themselves, then the struggle to achieve them is good in itself; it is my belief in those goals, my Americanism, which makes me want to fight to make America more, well, more American, by which I mean, more equal, free and democratic.\n\n<p>I remember chatting with a friend once about (I think) immigration, and I mentioned that as an American, I believed in equality before the law, so in the specifics we were discussing I stuck to that belief. He replied, somewhat scornfully, that America had never had equality before the law in that realm, and that on the contrary, American policy had been rather directly set up to privilege one group over another. He was right, and so was I. Because I am an American, I am and ought to be disappointed when my nation fails to live up to its ideals. The fault, though, is not in the ideals. America itself will never be as American as its dreams. We can try, though.\n\n<p>Redintegro Iraq,<br>\n-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Your Humble Blogger just read Michael Kazin\u2019s lengthy and provocative article about A Patriotic Left. It\u2019s got quite a bit to chew on, and I suspect I will wind up disagreeing with much of it, once I\u2019ve got a chance&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1271"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16799,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1271\/revisions\/16799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}