As the western world joined us in the commemoration of DDay, the words “who we are” were raised often. They sum up perfectly why American forces were afloat on the choppy currents of the English channel leading the Allied forces in the costly invasion of France, whose success would spell the doom of Hitler’s murderous Axis. Germany and Italy would fall in just ten months, and Japan four months later.
Victory transformed America dramatically. It rose from the crippling unemployment and poverty of the Great Depression into the unifying grip of war and sacrifice, shouldered by an unprecedented partnership of private and public enterprise that became the industrial giant that decided the war. Its output made DDay possible, and ultimately successful. The war effort as a whole, as much as any event since the Revolution, was written in “Who We Are.”
Seventy years later, it asks how much are we the same”Who We Are.” The sacrifice in 1944 was plain to see: freedom must endure. It was an imperfect freedom then. It’s an imperfect freedom today. But how are the battle lines different today than they were then?
The victory in WWII was clearly a victory for WeThePeople. The war ended with more than 16 million Americans in uniform, almost 15% of the population. It was a victory for the Founding Fathers. A victory for the Constitution. More than a handful of nations, emerging from the war, made our Constitution the model for writing their own.
But in the 21st century, the battle lines on freedom have been redrawn, and they challenge us to prove anew “Who Are We.” Against the painful memories of the reckless Twenties and the Great Depression, the war taught us that the common good is the reward of finding common ground. It showed us that the America envisioned so richly in the Preamble of the Constitution was reachable.
The wish on everyone’s lips, as the GIs poured home, “a car in every garage, a chicken in every pot,” was soon eclipsed by bigger dreams, as college degrees and homes on loans were defining a bullish new middle class, working up a life style on a scale without precedent. The United States was quickly the envy of the world, as much for its matchless breadbasket as for its surging middle class. These successes repeated in the postwar world would show again “Who We Are.”
Now, in the 21st century, we find ourselves fighting very different wars, yet wars that again test “Who We Are” with much less clarity than the conquest of fascism. Terrorism and extremism are hitting us in many forms, from many directions, as often at home as abroad, by shifting mixes of ideology and ignorance.
Looking back on DDay from another century, what better occasion than this to give new clarity to “Who We Are?” It could well prove our best weapon against terrorism, extremism and corruption.
The extremists of religion and politics are just as determined as Hitler was to make the world dance their dance. To overcome this menace, the Free World must come together, showing “Who We Are” in anthems that bind freedom to science, because its revelations are the vista by which mankind will survive, or it won’t. Just as the West must eradicate corruption and condemn decadence, the Muslim world must expunge Jihad, once and for all. Claims of divine authority are not “Who We Are,” because they are void of fact. Only as science buries superstition is the world redeemable.
And, the world must unite in taming corporate power. Nations acting separately lack the power to do it. They must come together for a new DDay, one determined to universalize the rule of law, in a common code to which all subscribe. One that walks the talk of justice and equality.
In praying for the success of the DDay invasion, FDR said the mission was to “set free a suffering humanity.” He called it a “righteous cause,” riding on a spirit that must “never be dimmed.”
Among nations, there is no cause more righteous than rule of law, nor any cause presently less true to its spirit. Nowhere in practice does it live close to that spirit. That spirit is not winning in the courts of western nations, and even less so in the rest of the world.
In the United States the law amounts in practice to rule by the profession of the law, in which justice stands second to the prosperity of the profession. It has roots in the Victorian model, in which justice was measured by the wealth and prominence of the practitioners. Lawyers often were the most prominent and wealthiest members of Victorian society, with doctors a distant second.
As American courts go about their business, the results most often favor the side that’s most heavily “lawyered up.” Which is just what the profession prefers: the quality of justice ought to reflect the size of the purse. To keep it an insiders’ game, it is consistently woven around technicalness, keeping principle and the Constitution on the shelf.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the spread of corporate power. As it distorts capitalism and erodes our middle class, it threatens the Constitution as much as it mocks it. Capitalism succeeds over time only if it spreads wealth more than it concentrates it. But corporate power does the opposite. It engenders oligarchy and inequality. As a result, the equal protection so emphatically promised in the Constitution remains unfulfilled in the 21st century. Could there be a more righteous cause today in both the USA and the world? Nothing would do more “to set free a suffering humanity,” if it were the heart of every legal code around the world.
The elections of 2014 and 2016 will go a long way toward telling us whether WeThePeople still hold sway, or the Supreme Court has sold us out to oligarchy. In the infamous Citizens United decision, the court let technicalities win. The 5-4 ruling held that corporations are people, simply because they are formed by people. Can anyone show me how a corporation that resembles a person? Or that embodies any senses or sensibilities? I’ve yet to meet anyone who swallows other people, or bleeds profits. But why would we expect the Court to vote against corporate power? It’s the most lucrative work the lawyers get. After all, the Justices are lawyers, every one. The profession eschews humanity, as it builds its refuge in technicalities. Yet the growing power of women in the profession is bound to give it more humanity. The law may yet “establish Justice,” as the Constitution promises.
Clearly, the next DDay is overdue. The ever righteous cause of equal protection must rise around the world, to free still more suffering humanity. To rectify humanity’s oldest crime against humanity, the enslavement and exploitation of women. Women must build and steer the armada, with enlightened men gladly manning up as needed. Hope is growing, with American women pointing the way. As they grow their majority of college enrollment, they today claim three of every five new bachelor degrees. As they rise in number and rank in the workforce emerging from the Bush-Cheney recession, they are the changing face of the new middle class. More and more, they are Who We Are.
Frank Mensel — July 2014