Do Not Cut the Flowers

Elton Trueblood wrote about the “cut-flower generation” being a generation that had been separated, cut-off from its roots.  Cut flowers do not long endure, he wrote, when severed from the roots that sustained them and gave them opportunity to grow, to blossom, to become all that flowers are meant to be.  I thought of this a few weeks ago when I cut the last three or four roses of the season and placed them in a vase with a little water.  The water was not sufficient to keep them very long—they soon faded and died.  Cut-flowers cannot survive once severed from their roots.

What are the “roots” that sustain us as Americans—all of us, not just some of us? With Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I would say that our roots are in a dream—“The American Dream.”  “It is a dream,” King said, “of a land where men (and women) of all races, of all nationalities and of all creeds can live together as brothers (and sisters).”  That dream is expressed in these words:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (women and children) 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.”  “This, said King at the 1961 commencement address at Lincoln University, “IS the dream.”

This dream declares that every person has rights that are not conferred by or derived from the state.  Human dignity and worth, said our Founding Fathers, does not come from this or that document (neither the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution or the Bill of Rights). The dignity and worth of every person (EVERY SINGLE PERSON) is God-given—and every person is so endowed.

Without this “not conferred by or derived from the state” but “endowed by their Creator” dignity and worth of every person, the American dream will become a “cut-flower” and shrivel up and die, for this dream is the root, the basic root, that sustains our democracy.  It is not a Declaration of Independence, a Constitution, or the Rule of Law that has given us life—allowing us to grow, to blossom and become what we are meant to be—it is, rather, this dream that all people “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights (dignity and worth).”  

The American Dream does not allow for the maligning of the characters of others—this practice is inconsistent with the dream—and cuts us off from the very roots that hold us together as a people—a democracy.  Vote tomorrow to prevent the flowers from being cut.