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Our father, Jacob, had a wonderful moment of honesty and clarity when he woke from a dream – Jacob’s ladder – you remember.  He looked around and said, “God was in this place and I didn’t know it.”

    Great moments come, but I am usually busy or thinking about something else.  I believe our national life has had stunning peaks and summits about which we have been barely conscious.  In this season of national flagellation, it might be nice to take a moment of two to celebrate what we have been missing.  Many of these moments are expressed negatively – what didn’t happen.  That means that noticing them is even harder.  There are catastrophes that didn’t occur trips that almost but didn’t result in our falling face down into a familiar necessary but unwelcome substance.

    One of those moments came at the end of the awful nightmare of the Civil War.  Lee and Grant are in the farmhouse at Appomatox.  Grant says, “The war is over.  Let the men who have horses take them, go home and put in a crop.”  Lee gives the message to his troops.  And so, there follows no generations of attrition, border skirmishes, guerilla sorties and endless bloodletting.  The field is left to very few outlaws and to the Hatfields and McCoys, and Jesse James.

    In 1952, a friend from Europe by way of Brazil asked my father, “Where do people go after the elections?”  My father had voted for Stevenson  “Go?” My father was confused.  “You know, until the reprisals die down.”  Isn’t it great how strange this sounds?  It’s common run in many places.  This time, I hope, we will walk by it and never notice that it isn’t there.

    President Kennedy was assassinated, and President Lyndon Johnson was sworn in that afternoon with Mrs. Kennedy, bloody skirt and all, on the plane to Washington.  Johnson didn’t want a break in leadership.  Was there a military coup?  No.  Roudings-up of tens or hundreds of possible conspirators?  No.  Our conspiracy theories, with much less harm, are exiled to the fringes of our national story.

    There have been times when the military has been called out to quell civil disturbances.  Numbers of military coups?  None.  A general just said of a photo op, “I shouldn’t have been there.”

    Are we always equal to the best in ourselves?  Is anyone, person or nation?  Old evil gets familiar, but there is also a phenomenon I’d like to call invisible light.  We looked at President Eisenhower – a great general?  Okay.  We took him for granted, featuring the dash and dream, the panache of a Patton, but in that war, Eisenhower got the three national divas to sing in harmony and so he did with his Presidency, quietly.

    Over it all, the greatest walk-by because it is the most common and so least noticed of our habits, that is, Shia v. Sunni, Hutu v. Tutsi, Irish Catholic v. Protestant.  Not here.  True, we are not great treasurers of other cultures.  My treasured scraps of Yiddish are, for you, as useful as cupping a dead man, a toiten bankis.  (Translation upon request)  

As a condition of being American, the rivalries and angers of other places have no place here.  We take that for granted.  I would like to echo Mark Twain, who said, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”  I wish that for the American dream.

    One of the humorous parts of the walk-by is that after we have walked by something, we give it a name, call it history.  The ‘40s, WWII, the ‘50s, peace and prosperity.  Pfiffel!  I was there.  The ‘50s were the father of the ‘60s.  We marched, we protested, but we were college kids who thought that we should look like adults when we stood up… hats and hose.  We disappeared in the crowd.

    So, this is a plea for gratitude and appreciation.  We have pointed the finger at ourselves enough.  After a while, our wrists ache.  When your wrists ache, you can’t clutch your single roll of Charmin.