WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED
"Americans
have sometimes believed they enjoy the greatest freedom of all-freedom
from history. No people can escape being bound, to some extent, by
their past. But if history teaches anything, it is that the definitions
of freedom and of the community entitled to enjoy it are never fixed
or final. We may not have it in our power, as Thomas Paine proclaimed
in 1776, "to begin the world over again." But we can decide
for ourselves what freedom is. No one can predict the ultimate fate
of current understandings of freedom, or whether alternative traditions
now in eclipse-freedom as economic security, freedom as active participation
in democratic governance, freedom as social justice for those long
disadvantaged-will be rediscovered and reconfigured to meet the challenges
of the new century. All one can hope is that in the future, the better
angels of our nature (to borrow Lincoln's words) will reclaim their
place in the forever unfinished story of American freedom."
-- James Foner in The Story of American Freedom, © 1998, pg.
332.