While I’m on a writing retreat from MORE TO COME this month, I’m posting one essay each week that you may have missed the first time it went online. This post — the last in these reprints — comes from my review of three different books on America’s future that I wrote in 2015.

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I read Parker J. Palmer’s Healing the Heart of Democracy after reading a review of this 2011 book and decided to add it to my list of works on politics and our future as a country.

This is a very personal book, and I won’t attempt to delve into Palmer’s personal journey.  It is important to note that he writes this from a “season of heartbreak” – both personal and political.  From the prelude:

The politics of our time is the “politics of the brokenhearted” — an expression that will not be found in the analytical vocabulary of political science or in the strategic rhetoric of political organizing.  Instead, it is an expression from the language of human wholeness. . . .  If we cannot talk about politics in the language of the heart – if we cannot be publicly heartbroken, for example, that the wealthiest nation on earth is unable to summon the political will to end childhood hunger at home – how can we create a politics worthy of the human spirit, one that has a chance to serve the common good?

The prelude is as good a place as any to capture the essence of Palmer’s book.

It is well known and widely bemoaned that we have neglected our physical infrastructure – the roads, water supplies, and power grids on which our daily lives depend.  Even more dangerous is our neglect of democracy’s infrastructure, and yet it is barely noticed and rarely discussed.  The heart’s dynamics and the ways in which they are shaped lack the drama and the “visuals” to make the evening news, and restoring them is slow and daunting work.  Now is the time to notice, and now is the time for the restoration to begin.

For those of us who want to see democracy survive and thrive – and we are legion – the heart is where everything begins:  that grounded place in each of us where we can overcome fear, rediscover that we are members of one another, and embrace the conflicts that threaten democracy as openings to new life for us and for our nation.

Parker has a new edition of this book out, updated for the 2020s.

I am not as hopeful at the moment as Palmer, but historian that I am I know we have faced difficult challenges as a people in our past. Our nation was not forged from a natural unity but found a unity in spite of differences.  We fought one declared Civil War to begin to address the enslavement of African Americans (which — as Bryan Stevenson has eloquently put it — then simply evolved into other forms of slavery).  We fought an undeclared Civil War to take over western lands from our native peoples. We went through a Gilded Age of great income inequality and the suffering that resulted, and we appear determined to repeat the sins of that era today.  We have incarcerated immigrants and others who don’t fit our preconceived notion of an American.  We have allowed corporations to take over our government and wrest power away from the people.

But so many of our parents, and their parents, and their parents before them have also fought for our idea of America.  I have to believe that the spirit to fight for that idea remains and I believe that if we see our Constitution as the framework for having those arguments — instead of a piece of literal scripture with the answer for every issue — we can continue to thrive.

And finally, we need to focus in this work on e pluribus unum as opposed to the official U.S. motto that corporate America gave us when they invented Christian America in the era of the 1930s to the 1950s to push back against New Deal reforms:  In God We Trust.  But that’s another post.

More to come . . .

DJB