What’s that “sure thought”? It has to do with a kind of democratic the Aristocracy, one thing most of us can acknowledge the second we see it. It’s Sojourner Reality asking the suffragists on the 1851 Lady’s Rights Conference in Akron, Ohio, “Ain’t I a girl?” It’s Lou Gehrig, stricken with A.L.S. in his 30s, calling himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
It’s Gail Halvorsen, the sweet bomber of the Berlin Airlift, parachuting sweets and gum to the hungry kids of the besieged metropolis. It’s John McCain refusing a suggestion to be launched earlier than different American P.O.W.s in North Vietnamese captivity — and, 40 years later, publicly rebuking a supporter for calling Barack Obama, his opponent within the 2008 presidential race, “an Arab.”
It’s Robert F. Kennedy after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination: “What we want in america shouldn’t be division; what we want in america shouldn’t be hatred; what we want in america shouldn’t be violence and lawlessness; however is love and knowledge, and compassion towards each other.” It’s George H.W. Bush after lightning victory within the Persion Gulf struggle: “This isn’t a time of euphoria, definitely not a time to brag.”
Democratic the Aristocracy can be discovered on a web page I preserve in my desk drawer, a passenger manifest of the ship that introduced my 10-year-old mom to america, due to the Displaced Individuals Act of 1948. Proper under my mom’s identify and nationality — “Stateless” — there may be Jamil Issa Hasan, 26, Jordanian; Bruna Klar, 27, Italian; Martha Kohlhaupt, 41, German; and Gerda Nesselroth, 45, additionally stateless.
Quickly to be Individuals all.
What all of this boils right down to is the self-restraint and compassion of the briefly highly effective, the self-respect and absence of self-pity of the briefly weak, and the shared conviction that robust and weak are united in a standard democratic creed. It’s what folks used to admire about our nationwide character — mythologized to some extent, however based mostly in one thing actual: understatement and confidence, decency and expectation, the America of Huck and Jim, Bogart and Hepburn, Shepard and Glenn.
