A Parable for Our Time

I have been thinking for some time now that I'm glad my parents are no longer alive. It would break their hearts to witness what has happened to what my father used to describe as “America, the best country!” As a child I spent many a Fourth of July with him, lining our sidewalks with a procession of small American flags leading up to the huge flag hanging from the front awning. Of course, we had many arguments over the dinner table as I and my brothers got old enough to think differently about the United States, especially concerning race, foreign policy, covert operations in more places than I could ever have guessed… BUT this is the place my parents were eventually able to land—albeit with false papers1—after experiencing indescribable horrors in Nazi Poland and post-war Germany. What I didn't know about myself is how much of their experience of the United States I carried. How much my identity—my joie de vivre—depended on keeping what they thought about life here alive. How much my own experience of hopefulness was contingent on some very basic principles of democracy that “America, the best country,” represented.2

On June 24, 2022, the day the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy, Heather Cox Richardson posted the following:

The Dobbs decision marks the end of an era: the period in American history stretching from 1933 to 1981, the era in which the U.S. government worked to promote democracy. It tried to level the playing field between the rich and the poor by regulating business and working conditions. It provided a basic social safety net through programs like Social Security and Medicare and, later, through food and housing security programs. It promoted infrastructure like electricity and highways, and clean air and water, to try to maintain a standard of living for Americans. And it protected civil rights by using the Fourteenth Amendment, added to the U.S. Constitution in 1868, t