As we prepare to celebrate the 242nd birthday of America, you hear a lot about America being more divided than it has been.
Certainly there is evidence of deep divisions politically and culturally. We see signs of it every day. All you have to do is turn on the cable news channels or the radio talk shows or have a conversation with someone at work or even a friend.
But if we look back 50 years ago, the year 1968 was also described as a time, when our country was divided politically and culturally.
It was a time of tumultuous events. We were in the middle of the Vietnam War and anti-war protests on college campuses. We were shocked by the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and Senator Robert Kennedy. We witnessed race riots in the streets of some big cities. And we watched on TV violent clashes between police and protestors in Chicago outside the Democratic National Convention.
And in the fall, Richard Nixon was elected president beginning years of more political division and more protests over the war and eventually a break in at the Watergate Hotel in Washington that would lead to impeachment hearings and eventually his resignation.
Despite all that division, our country survived. Just as it did 100 years earlier… when the Civil War literally divided us for a time.
But It was President Lincoln who warned that a “house divided against itself cannot stand.” And now after all these many decades, our country still stands despite the divisions in the past, and in the present.
That’s because our founders were led to create a form of government that was created to withstand division. Something to be thankful for on this 4th of July in America.