Fratricide Will Do Us In

We know from the pyramids of Egypt, the ruins of the Palace of Knossos in Crete, the ancient Parthenon of Athens, and the tumbling Colosseum of Rome that great and wondrous human societies have arisen and flourished for a season and then have disappeared.  Abraham Lincoln wondered,  as many others have and still do,  if the American experiment, the American Dream,  would eventually go the way of the Egyptian, Minoan, Athenian and Roman civilizations.  Would these United States succumb to the same outcomes and if so, how would it happen?  Lincoln decided that the fall of America, if it were to come, would not come by military aggression from the outside, but from inner decay.  “At what point then,” he wrote, “is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, ‘If it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us.  It cannot come from abroad.  If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.  As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.’”

The Civil War was one such suicidal attempt.  It was fratricide.  And that fratricide continued after the war in many and varied forms in the treatment of people of color, women, children, immigrants, etc.  The threat to the United States did not come from without (and it still does not come from without).  It “springs up amongst us.”  We are “its author and finisher.”  

Suicide is the act of taking one’s own life.  Fratricide is the act of taking the life of one’s brother or sister (or a fellow countryman).  We do ourselves in and commit a kind of suicide when we ignore the Dream.  We make ourselves small when we are meant to be great. We do our brothers and sisters an injustice and commit a form of fratricide when we bully, threaten, label, and put the other down.  It is this  basic lack of “morality” that will bring about our decline as human beings and as a human society called America. 

The American Dream will fade and no doubt die if we abandon the moral responsibility to be our brother and sister’s keeper and to love our neighbor as ourselves. We can destroy ourselves (suicide) by our mean-spirited behavior toward our brothers and sisters (fratricide).