The State of the Union Address, this year’s version now receiving its reviews, cannot actually address the state of the nation. The state of this nation can only be a question.
The nation conceived itself in an idea, as a People who hold a creed, of truths that all humans are equally and inherently endowed with individual rights, and that government exists to secure those rights. This conception ignored all prior markers of national identity, blood, soil, tongue, church or creation myth. It made us radically different from almost any other national identity, unprecedented in our nature. Against all other national conceptions, ours is so new that our continued existence cannot be taken for granted.
The holding of truths is not like residence in a territory or shared DNA; it requires this People to continue, in deliberate intent, to embrace those truths and survive in fidelity to them. We can undo our nation without even meaning to, by negligence. We can lose it if we fail to secure conditions of life that support our creed. The world could, conceivably, overwhelm us in our own minds if we do not have the will or the wherewithal to endure in our holding. Every question and challenge is a test, and we must pass test after test until the world might adopt the idea that an idea is the standard of national identity. America is that perpetual experiment that we call ourselves.
Whether a President declares that the state of the union is strong, or invokes history to assert that we stand at a crossroads, is a political statement, voiced to serve some combination of interests. In our perpetual experiment we always stand at a crossroad, and our strength cannot be evaluated but will be discovered, in our choices and our actions as they unfold.
We know this is true. Even at every ball game, if we sing the first stanza of the national anthem, we ask a question – is the flag still up? In a certain reading, we really ask if it still waves over the land of the free and the home of the brave. And that question will always stand.
As Lincoln said at Gettysburg, it is for us to be dedicated to the unfinished task before us. We always need to grow toward the aspiration of rights for all, in all the freedoms that we can find and discover. That is the state of our nation, day by day, challenge by challenge.
Common Conviction 