willingness to be this new thing

 I've been reading an article in Plough, an interview with Ken Burns, the filmmaker and historian. 

"This word 'liberty' had an incredible effect. Why would anybody want to give up the benefits of being a subject of the British constitutional monarchy? Most of everyone's wealth, education, prosperity, and literacy came from that colonial relationship. Why would you give up those benefits for freedom and democracy, ideas never tried before in human history? At the heart of the American experiment is possibility. At the heart is risk. At the heart of it is this willingness to be this new thing, a citizen.

It's not hard to be a subject. You're under authoritarian rule and you just put up with stuff. But to be a citizen is to assume responsibility, to assume the pursuit of happiness, which the Founders understood not as the acquisition of things, but the pursuit of lifelong learning. Lifelong learning made you more virtuous, and the more virtuous you were, the more possibility that you could begin to bear the responsibility of citizenship and to be able, if not to answer, then to ask more authentically those essential questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? What is my purpose? Where am I going?

I am interested in these gigantic conflicts like the Revolution that produce something as spectacularly interesting as this idea that people, for the first time in human history, could govern themselves. It wasn't just the aristocracy that pushed this forward, but ordinary people who debated over the ratification of the Constitution and the subsequent Bill of Rights. It is one of the most active moments in the history of humanity of people coming together in a civic way to create something. But did they agree? No, not at all.

In the compromises of the Constitution, there was the perpetuation of slavery, even though it had just been proclaimed eleven years earlier that 'all men are created equal'. And yet saying these things began to open the door to permit even the people who knew it wasn't about them to see path forward. Women, Native peoples, free and enslaved black people, and the poor understood that this was the opening salvo in battles that they could fight to make the words truer and less hypocritical. So, for me, in American history, the best sometimes comes out of the worst and sometimes the worst comes out of the best."

                                                     -  Ken Burns

I didn't mean to quote so much of it. But it's a week since the 250th July 4th, and it seems weird that it's not more of a big deal; I really appreciate his vision of this country.