Cameron Brown: A city upon a hill

In his "Lyceum Address" given on Jan. 27, 1838, to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln said: "At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

As if to affirm Lincoln's wise counsel, Walt Kelly's 1971-Earth-Day comic strip "Pogo" declared, "We have met the enemy and they are us.”

To the keen observer of today's current events, the only sane rejoinder to Kelly's comic-strip humor is "we laugh so we don't cry."

The trending decline of America is happening in real time at an accelerated pace bringing the words of a young Abraham Lincoln and a comic-strip creator into sharp focus. The cause is not from without but from within and of our own doing, the most egregious culprits being the unbridled spending of our national government and a willful and deliberate public policy that has created a porous southern border allowing masses of humanity to stream into our country without vetting.

Additionally, there has been a concerning cultural revisionism that is not healthy to the body politic. Karl Marx was right when he said, “Take away a nation’s heritage and they are more easily persuaded.” The attack on American exceptionalism and the chants of "death to America" from the very place that put America and the world on wheels is unacceptable and un-American. It is our heritage as a free people — imperfect as our history may be — that is the glue of our national unity and the foundation for the promise of America — to be a beacon of liberty for the oppressed, a land of opportunity for the rest.

America's exceptionalism is found in her founding, birthed through sacrifice that forged a unique constitutional republic whose patriotism is rooted in the affirmation of God-given rights and the blessings of freedom and liberty. Oh, but you say our nation was founded on racism and genocide. No, it was founded with all the imperfections of a fallen humanity on "that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence," as Lincoln said, "which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but ... to the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men."

Do the millions streaming unlawfully across our southern border know what constitutional amendment ensures the freedom to speak and worship freely in America — the normal instruction for that sacred rite of passage — American citizenship? Do they know the story of the Liberty Bell? Have they memorized the Gettysburg Address? Do they know about the hardships at Valley Forge or the unwavering courage of the Delaware Crossing and the D-Day Landings? Do they understand the privilege of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and the honor of standing for the singing of our national anthem? Do they know about the motto stamped on our coins and printed on our dollar bills that is the source of our national strength?

Onboard the flagship Arbella, John Winthrop said it best: "We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world." May it yet be said of this generation that we honored Winthrop's vision to be that city upon a hill.

— Cameron S. Brown is president of the Kalamazoo Abraham Lincoln Institute and a former Michigan State Senator. Follow him at HistoryFrontiers.blog.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Cameron Brown: A city upon a hill