oselle | Found It

In my post yesterday I mentioned a quote that I wished I could find, by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Considering Schlesinger was an assistant to and chronicler of President John F. Kennedy, this quote is especially meaningful today in the wake of Senator Edward Kennedy's death. This is from an interview with Schlesinger in 1969, but it is even more relevant today. The emphasis is mine:

“We are today the most frightening people on this planet. The ghastly things we do to our own people, the ghastly things we do to other people, these must at least compel us to look searchingly at ourselves and our society before hatred and violence rushes on to more evil, and finally tear our nation apart. . . we cannot blame the epidemic of murder at home on deranged and solitary individuals, separate from the rest of us. For these individuals are plainly weak and suggestible men stamped by our society with a birth rite of hatred and a compulsion toward violence. We must recognize, I believe that the evil is in us, that it springs from some dark intolerable tension in our history and our institutions. It is almost as though some primal curse had been fixed on our nation. We are a violent people with a violent history, and the instinct for violence has seeped into the bloodstream of our national life.”

I have a superstitious streak and I believe in things like destiny and fate and karma or, if you will, that what goes around just comes around. All great nations of this earth (and many of the not-so-great) have blood on their hands. Yet there are few nations founded with such radically noble intentions that, in truth, wound up being constructed upon two terrible evils -- the genocide of one people and the enslavement of another.

I've thought about this from time to time over the last few years and especially in the last month. America was founded in an extraordinary spirit of enlightenment and has done a lot of good in the world. We've had many great leaders, one of whom we lost today, and for much of our history we really have been a beacon of light for the rest of the world.

But this is still a nation with a profoundly dark legacy. At times I believe that the sins of our past are so awful that they can never be expiated by our good deeds, can never be cleansed, but are now at last bearing their final rotten fruit.