We are not perfect, we Americans. We have never been. Our founders tended toward bombastic exaggeration that even they knew was not true. All men were not created equal, nor would they be given the chance to become equal. If you were not white, male, landed and educated, you had little chance of climbing the social and economic ladders. Many, in fact, were enslaved and legally prevented from advancing. Women, too, were legally inferior. They were not represented in our electorate and were handicapped in our capitalistic economy. Our indigenous people were treated more like animals than humans.

Four score and seven years after our Declaration of Independence, our nation was engaged in a great civil war. Abraham Lincoln generously credited our forefathers with creating a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” That great war was, in fact, fought to determine whether we would continue to abide the slavery that our forefathers created. Had the South won, slavery as an institution protected by the force of law would have persisted.

Children of any color could be exploited in the labor market until 1938. Women had to wait nearly a century and a half after our Declaration of Independence to be allowed to vote, and even longer to enjoy all of the benefits of our capitalist economy. Our indigenous people were never adequately compensated for what was taken from them and done to them. Black people had to endure repressive Jim Crow laws until nearly two centuries after we declared that all men were created equal, and then the thinly veiled “war on drugs” that selectively targeted them.

Our version of capitalism has created large numbers of people who lack the resources to lead safe and healthy lives, and created a few people with so much wealth that it translates into inordinate political power and robs our economy of the ability to achieve universal goals.

There are people who want to suppress the ugliness in our past. They do our nation a grave disservice. We cannot suppress our shortcomings without discrediting our achievements. We overcame slavery and Jim Crow, we awarded women suffrage and access to our economic benefits, we protected children from exploitive labor practices, we better recognize the rights of Indigenous people, and we created programs that funnel financial resources into the care of the poor.

The heroes and heroines who propelled our nation forward over these past two-and-a-half centuries deserve our admiration and recognition. We cannot tell their stories, though, unless we know the history of our journey. Neither can we tell it if the magnificence of their accomplishments is hidden beneath the weight of what is left to be done. We all should be proud of our country, too proud to allow it to be destroyed in a pique of self- righteousness and greed. Rather, we should seek to become the heroes and heroines who continue to move our country forward. We are standing on the shoulders of giants, some famous and some whose names we will never know. We should be reaching up, adding our height to theirs, not descending into a future that discards the values our forebears defended to the death.

Kenneth Hines writes from Athens.