To love one’s country, Edmund Burke said, one’s country ought to be lovely. It would appear that 1 in 3 Americans, more than 100 million of us, no longer see our country as truly lovely.
In Stephen Vincent Benet’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” the tale is told that if you approached Webster’s grave and called out his name, a voice would boom in reply, “Neighbor, how stands the Union?”
“Then you better answer the Union stands as she stood, rock-bottomed and copper-sheathed, one and indivisible, or he’s liable to rear right out of the ground.”
Today, it would be untruthful to answer to the soul of Webster that our Union is “rock-bottomed and copper-sheathed, one and indivisible.”
For the divisions among us replicate those Webster witnessed in his last years before the War Between the States.
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