What’s that “sure concept”? 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 Fact asking the suffragists on the 1851 Girl’s Rights Conference in Akron, Ohio, “Ain’t I a woman?” 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 goodies and gum to the hungry kids of the besieged metropolis. It’s John McCain refusing a proposal 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’d like in the US is just not division; what we’d like in the US is just not hatred; what we’d like in the US is just not violence and lawlessness; however is love and knowledge, and compassion towards each other.” It’s George H.W. Bush after lightning victory in the Persion Gulf war: “This isn’t a time of euphoria, actually not a time to brag.”
Democratic the Aristocracy can be discovered on a web page I hold in my desk drawer, a passenger manifest of the ship that introduced my 10-year-old mom to the US, because of the Displaced Individuals Act of 1948. Proper under my mom’s title and nationality — “Stateless” — there’s 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 all the way down to is the self-restraint and compassion of the quickly highly effective, the self-respect and absence of self-pity of the quickly 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.
