Curley: America isn’t as divided as you think, and that’s what the founders wanted

We have a birthday coming up. We have 150 days from today, and we — meaning all Americans — are invited to celebrate the birth of this great nation.

We did it before, 50 years ago. CBS helped out when they started this thing called Bicentennial Minutes, brought to you by Shell.

CBS started these about two years before July 4, 1976. CBS asked big stars to appear. Many of them are like, ‘Why should I be in a free commercial for Shell?’ But then, eventually, they caught on, and then everybody wanted to be in them and appear in these Bicentennial Minutes.

They were one minute long, opening with the flourish that you heard with the trumpets and the French horns. They interrupted the normal broadcast show to remind the viewers about historical moments of great importance.

Today, we have fragmented entertainment with so many choices. So something like this would probably never fly, plus Americans themselves are also fragmented. Maybe it’s because of the fragmenting of entertainment and news, but we, the people, feel more like us and them.

A poll proves this. You can get any poll to prove anything, that 80% of us, when surveyed, disagree on the facts. How do you even begin to celebrate anything when you disagree with just basic facts?

Basic facts are hard to prove, and people are having problems with it, and it is rather a depressing number. In 1976, we came out, away from the riots, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, the country’s birthday, where boys and girls, all of us, were in pain.

We were broken, but we were willing to all come together again. We were like divorced couples that show up together at the kid’s birthday party. They put personal pain aside for the sake of the child because there’s a love for the child.

The fighting parents might grit their teeth, but they smile and they sing along to “Happy Birthday” as they snap a photo of the child blowing out the candles, hoping that the wish from the child is not something like whether or not the parents can get back together again, but more fanciful, more childlike, more carefree — like the kids blowing out the candles, hoping for a pony.

What I learned from ‘The Greatest Sentence Ever Written’

I have a suggestion that I’ll take from CBS, like the Bicentennial Minute, there’s a historian, Walter Isaacson. He is a great historian. He’s written many, many books. He has a new one called “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.”

The sentence, in its original form, could actually be found in the basement of the Library of Congress. The historian found it there, and he dissected it, and he dusted it for metaphorical fingerprints. And there were three that had really touched it, but many others had helped form it.

The sentence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

If you read the book, and I have — I highly recommend it, by the way — Thomas Jefferson takes his first draft and sends it over to Ben Franklin, says, “Would the good Dr. Franklin, with his great wisdom, please improve this?” Franklin wrote to Jefferson.

Here’s what Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be sacred.” Franklin got his pen out, crossed out sacred, and replaced it with self-evident. Interesting. Why? Because Franklin wanted the nation born not of religion, but of rational logic, not something that was sacred.

Jefferson had another edit coming this time, John Adams got his hands on it, and he crossed out endowed with certain rights, and inserted religion back into it with endowed by their creator. So you get the sense of compromise here.

They’re trying to strike a balance, a delicate balance between logic and religion, thinking of the time of drafting, there were many other call-outs as well.

So while they’re standing in this room, there is a servant, because you think about, well, it was a terrible time, and there was slavery, and there was so much hypocrisy. Yeah, I get all that. The fact that there was a guy named Thomas Hemings who was standing in the room, who was a servant, whose sister would end up bearing Thomas Jefferson’s love child. All of that taken into consideration.

But the fact that all of these men stood in this room in Philadelphia wanting a country, some of them to be free of slaves, others to want slavery. But they were all working together, one thing in common, the common ground that this country would be setting upon with a firm foundation of logic and religion that would lead to eventually all of us, both men and women, black and white, everyone, all peoples — being free.

Like divorced parents, we can still show up for America

America is not as divided as the media would like you to believe. They need you to believe that, so you continue to click on stuff.

But left and right loudmouths like the fighting, estranged parents at the birthday party, need to, once again, grit their teeth and realize it is not about them and their personal slights, but a celebration of the greatest nation born of compromise for the common good.

A nation that millions and millions and millions and millions of people come to from very, very far away so that they can be free — free individuals for life, liberty and their own pursuit of happiness. We have 150 days. So let’s get ready to sing “Happy Birthday,” and let’s put aside the petty differences and sing for the sake of the kid, which is America.

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