Someday, someone’s going to have to remember.
If it’s not too many years, it might not be that hard to remember, but if it’s longer, it’s going to be harder.
Someone will have to remember the old words, the words of The Constitution and Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. and all those old rusty amendments that let people vote.
And we’ll have to remember the purposes, the drive to equality, the hankering for justice, the reason why the republic was built.
They will be lost words, lost purposes, concealed beneath a worshipped flag until they rotted.
And someone will have to remember compassion and grace and lifting up instead of grinding down.
I know The Hail Mary because one of my grandmothers taught it to me the way it was taught to her, sweet words in a loving voice, the transmission of simple sentences from one generation to the next.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God / Pray for us sinners …”
“With liberty and justice for all …”
“I have a dream … “
Prayers and principles, things we’ll have to remember when it’s time to rebuild.
When the Roman Empire ended, Europe wobbled and sank into disease and isolation, with dialects differing in villages 20 miles apart, and the roads were still there, but they didn’t go anywhere anymore, and all roads led to Rome, but Rome was a weedy graveyard of broken statues.
But there were still books here and there, and words and poems and prayers and half-remembered notions of Greek democracy and Roman senators.
Monks wrote them down, copied them and passed them hand to hand, and they studied so that the words of the poets and the philosophers and the doctors and those who believed men could reach higher than dirt would not be lost.
Those words of freedom flowered again in America, where we took a little bit from every idea and made a republic, a democracy, a functioning freedom machine that was always reaching out to embrace new people.
We discovered, after much struggle and death, that the principles transmitted to us from nearly lost manuscripts could be applied not just to white Christian men but to slaves and their descendants, women, Jews, immigrants, gays, everyone.
I said The Hail Mary late last Tuesday night. I do not have to read it on my phone.
Someday, far from now, or quite close, some of us will have to be the rememberers, the monks, the grandmothers teaching the old, powerful words.
If it takes long enough, some of us may creep into a ruined Capitol full of broken statues and whisper the words and remember what it was like before.
Share the principles. Share the words. Keep them strong. Repeat them often. Prepare to rebuild and get back everything we lose.
Democracy isn’t natural. Kings are natural, and dictators and tyranny, and that’s why a free people is always half an inch from slavery.
Pray it won’t last. We have those words and remember the other words, transmitted through dark centuries until some few nations forged them into a freedom that gleamed like gold.
Marc Dion is a syndicated columnist.
