Five words chiseled in stone tie America’s past to its current state of political upheaval.
“What is past is prologue,†reads the inscription on Robert Ingersoll Aitken’s Present, a sculpture on the Pennsylvania Avenue side of the in Washington, D.C.
On Oct. 21, as we walked by it on the way to see the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, I asked my 12-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter if they understood what it meant. We were in the nation’s capital to watch my older son run in the Marine Corps Marathon, but first, there were museums and monuments to visit. Call it a field trip to replace the days of school my kids were missing.
Earlier that same day, we visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Never Forget,†it says on the outside of the building. Inside, the story of how the world sat by and watched as a madman began the process of exterminating 6 million Jews is told in photos, videos and powerful art and memorials.
People are also reading…
The words “ºüÀêÊÓƵ†drew my son’s attention. He read about across the Atlantic to Cuba, where they were denied asylum. It was 1939. The refugees appealed to the U.S. to take them in, but, no, they were turned away. The ship headed back to Europe, where Great Britain and several other countries took the refugees in. More than 200 of them ended up in countries eventually taken over by the Nazis and, to America’s shame, would end up victims of the Holocaust.
If past is prologue, the ghosts of 1939 would echo in 2017 America.
There was a rising nationalistic sentiment in the Depression-era U.S. Many Americans feared immigration. There were anti-Semitic rallies.
A couple of days after our visit to the nation’s capital, Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., took the floor of the Senate and the op-ed pages of the Washington Post and asked his colleagues — and the nation — to remember the past.
, Flake invoked the McCarthy hearings of 1954, when one U.S. senator sought to demonize thousands of Americans on flimsy evidence that they might have some connection to communism. “We had temporarily forgotten who we were supposed to be†as a nation, Flake wrote. “We face just such a time now. We have again forgotten who we are supposed to be. There is a sickness in our system — and it is contagious.â€
The target of Flake’s speech was President Donald Trump, who during and after his successful 2016 campaign has whipped up a nationalistic fervor that demonizes Hispanics, Muslims, immigrants and blacks. Flake has had “enough,†he said. He won’t run for re-election and continue to be part of a Republican Party that has abandoned its principles in favor of “anger and resentment.â€
“How much more damage to our democracy and to the institutions of American liberty do we need to witness in silence before we count ourselves as complicit in that damage?†Flake said.
Also declining to run for re-election to the Senate while blaming Trump for his churlish behavior that demonizes entire classes of people is Republican Bob Corker of Tennessee.
Their criticism mirrors that of former U.S. Sen. Jack Danforth, the father of the modern Republican Party in Missouri.
“It isn’t a matter of occasional asides, or indiscreet slips of the tongue uttered at unguarded moments,†. “Trump is always eager to tell people that they don’t belong here, whether it’s Mexicans, Muslims, transgender people or another group. His message is, ‘You are not one of us,’ the opposite of ‘e pluribus unum.’ And when he has the opportunity to unite Americans, to inspire us, to call out the most hateful among us, the KKK and the neo-Nazis, he refuses.â€
Danforth, of course, has long been out of electoral politics. Flake and Corker are leaving.
They are the canaries in a coal mine, calling on a divided nation to remember its past. One of the great monuments to that past is the Lincoln Memorial, a tribute to the president who kept America together at its most divided moment in history.
“In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever,†reads the inscription chiseled above the massive statue of America’s 16th president.
The question that haunted this country in Lincoln’s time is important again, in the Age of Trump.
As those who might stand in the way of the worst parts of the president’s agenda abandon ship, who will unite America’s broken hearts?