Written by
The country has changed in the last 100 years, largely for the better. Considering how much we argue, I thought it would be nice to go over some of those changes, and remind everyone - including myself - that we have common ground.
VOTING
100 years ago, women couldn't vote at all. It would be eleven more years before we as a society realized the folly of this, and enfranchised the other half of the population.
100 years ago, while black men could sometimes vote, Jim Crow laws made it largely impossible. A black man trying to vote was likely endangering himself and his family.
WORKING
100 years ago, it was still legal to exploit children for labor. But in 1938, FDR signed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which marked the beginning of the end of such exploitation, allowing children to have real childhoods.
100 years ago, workplace safety was nonexistent. In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory burned, resulting in a death toll of 148, mostly women. Today, locking employees into the buildings they work in is illegal, largely because of this terrible accident.
SOCIAL
100 years ago, a man was unlikely to be arrested for beating or raping his wife. The former, while technically illegal, was still a commonly accepted practice and rarely punished. The latter was largely considered impossible. It's only in the last 100 years that we have discarded the idea that women are property.
100 years ago, segregation was in full force. Interracial marriages were illegal. in 1909, a mob in Cairo, Illinois, lynched a black man named Will James. No one was ever prosecuted for the murder.
100 years ago, religious discrimination was commonplace; signs like "No Irish Please" appeared in shop windows next to Help Wanted signs, discriminating against Irish Catholics.
There are many things on which we disagree with one another. But America today is the result of vast - and sometimes painful - changes, as we've abandoned traditional beliefs that we realized were wrong. America today is a far better place to live in - for ALL her citizens - than America of 100 years ago.
But not everything can, or should, change. America was only capable of such progress because our founders enshrined in our an ideal that we all ought to consider immortal and unchanging:
We the People.
We set our own agenda. We make our own rules, and discard them at will. We decide the course of our country's destiny, and bend knee to no king.
On that, I think, we all agree.