Responding to last night’s fatal attacks on police in Dallas, and to the deaths that preceded it, Texas Governor Greg Abbott released the following statement:

Our thoughts and prayers are with the Dallas law enforcement community and the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) officers killed and injured this evening. I’ve spoken to Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw and have directed him to offer whatever assistance the City of Dallas needs at this time. In times like this we must remember – and emphasize – the importance of uniting as Americans.

 

I can’t think of anything that could help more than that at this time. Something has got to pull us back together again. I just don’t know if we remember what uniting as Americans means.

We used to know what it meant. It meant we were united around a common vision of constitutional democracy for the sake of “liberty and justice for all.” Obviously it took us several decades and a horrific war to begin to recognize that “all” really meant all; that the operative word in “people of color” was “people,” not “color;” that black men and women were first of all men and women, deserving of full human rights because they were fully human. That error was evil, and as of this week it’s obvious we’re still paying a price for it.

Uniting as Americans once meant holding to a common, constitutional vision of limited powers shared among several branches and several layers of government, again for the sake of liberty. It meant the rule of law; that we were a “government of laws, not of people;” that members of government were as subject to law as any of the rest of us. Events in Washington earlier this week make it harder than ever to believe we can unite around that vision of America any longer.

Uniting as Americans once meant an almost sacred devotion to the Bill of Rights. But First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and religion are under deep duress, as we’ve lost track of the crucial role they play in holding ourselves accountable to standards of (pardon the archaisms) goodness and virtue as well as accountability in the land. (And those of us who believe in God are even more concerned over the effects of driving Him out of the public square — or attempting to do so, at any rate.)

I’m not sure I know what we have left to unite around. We share a common place to live and work, and a common economy. We live within the same borders. We coexist here. We ought to be able to get along, right? We ought to be able to tolerate one another. But when anger flares, as it certainly has this week (and understandably so), “tolerance” is revealed as less than the ideal virtue it’s been made out to be. It’s an ethic of coexistence, not of unity. In a day like today the cry for tolerance can only rise to a shriek: “Hey! Everybody start getting along! Stop hurting each other!”

We need something more substantial to bring us back together again.

Governor Abbott was right: we need to unite. We need to come together in honest, vulnerable dialogue; vulnerable especially to listen and hear how we have failed in our civil relationships. We need to remind ourselves there’s a common vision we share as Americans. We need once again to recognize — together — that this country was formed to bring liberty and justice to all; that it is a government of laws, not of men, so justice will be served equally to all; that we are committed to goodness together as a nation under God.

That’s an ideal vision, obviously. America has never lived up to it fully. No one knew that better than Abraham Lincoln. No naive idealist he, nevertheless Lincoln kept the unifying American vision before the nation: that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth;” and that

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Let’s recall what it means to be America; then maybe we can unite as Americans.