Mythologically, the history of
our people is of one emergence
after another, of those we force
underground. Our law, the story
goes, is continuously informed by
their genius for caring for each
other. But this proposition of the
benignly glassy sea is only missing
the ingredient of turmoil to preci-
pitate these turns. One arbiter af-
ter the next is allowed, thereby,
to muse on whether there has been
enough turmoil, to retire exhausted
law. Read our pages. We are not a
people who will ever be exhausted
first.
But there is another strand in this,
which no one can deny, who lives in
any republic, anywhere. It is that
we are peoples who are responsible
for how our laws behave, or can not
bear responsibility for ourselves.
It is the rôle of our institutions
not merely to allow this to happen,
but to structure this passage. Our
laws resemble us, but unless they
are wise, humane - what we call,
just - we cannot resemble them. In
every discernible cycle of submer-
gence and ascent, we come to recog-
nize the decrepitude of mistake,
oversight, or worse, and direct our-
selves toward its remedy. Here we
are.
The great fortune of this nation is
to have bred a people prepared to see
that it is fair, even if we never saw
coming, from every family here, an o-
versight announcing its own name.
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