A Warning in Marble: Part 5 of the 5-part series.

The week of its 250th, what's the real state of American democracy?

Read Part I here - Restraint.
Read Part II here - Dissent.
Read Part III here - Separation.
Read Part IV here - Allegiance.

V. Sovereignty

You’ve waited to know about the fifth pillar. But I owe you a confession. There isn’t one. Not in the way I’ve been describing them so far.

I let you believe there were five columns holding up the American republic, because that’s how it looks from the promenade, craning your neck at all that marble. However, the thing I have been calling the fifth pillar is not quite a pillar. Rather, it’s the understructure. I count it as part of the five. To show you why, I have to take you somewhere the marble cannot follow. I have to take you onto an airplane, alongside a man whose story I’ve retold for many years

* * *

“Let’s roll.”

Those were Todd Beamer’s final words after he set down the phone at thirty-five thousand feet.

Todd was an account manager for a computer company, and his early-morning business trip came on the heels of a five-day vacation in Italy. He and his wife had just returned the night before. Rather than take off immediately on his work trip, he decided to spend the evening at home. He had dinner with his wife, who was in the second trimester of pregnancy, and put his two sons to bed.

The next day, Todd was midair on the way from Newark to San Francisco when his plane was hijacked.

About forty-five minutes into the flight, four men stormed the cockpit. They slit the throats of the pilots and took over the aircraft. One of them made an announcement over the intercom. In broken English, he told the passengers: “Ladies and gentlemen. Here the captain. Please sit down, keep remaining seating. We have a bomb on board. So sit.”

The attackers herded passengers into the rear of the jet. Then, they banked back toward the East Coast.

In his seat, Todd fumbled with the corded airplane phone. The kind that used to be installed on the back of headrests to make in-flight phone calls. He was connected with Lisa Jefferson, a call center representative for the in-flight phone company. He calmly described the scene for her to relay to the authorities. Their plane had been hijacked by men with knives. One appeared to have a bomb strapped to his body. Down in the galley, the pilots were lying motionless on the floor. A fellow passenger had been killed, too.

Lisa promised she wouldn’t hang up, though Todd wasn’t the only one on the phone.

His seatmates were calling friends and loved ones. They learned that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been struck by hijacked airplanes. As they started to put the pieces together, the passengers and remaining crew huddled quietly near Todd’s seat to discuss the situation. Should they wait and see what happened? Try to retake the plane? Forty ordinary Americans discussed their situation and did something so simple and so profound that we’ve almost forgotten how it came to be.

They took a vote.

They didn’t want to be the next aircraft flown into a target. So they took a vote and agreed to retake the cockpit. And that was that. Strapped into a doomed airplane, thirty-five thousand feet over Pennsylvania, with the most powerful government on earth utterly unable to reach them — no court could rule for them, no Congress could act for them, no president or army could save them in the minutes they had left — forty citizens did not wait to be governed. They decided together to act.

Still on the phone, Todd informed Lisa that they planned to wrest control of the plane back from the hijackers. He asked her to do him a favor. If he didn’t survive, he wanted her to call his wife with a message: “Tell her I love her and the boys.” Todd didn’t know whether she was having a boy or a girl, but he hoped it was a little girl. Four months later, his hopes were answered without his presence.

Todd recited the Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 23. The operator followed along with him.

“…Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me…”

When he was done, he set down the phone. Without hanging up. Lisa was still listening, as Todd rose and addressed his fellow passengers.

“You ready?” he asked them. “Okay. Let’s roll.”

They rushed to the front of the plane. A few minutes later, after a struggle in the cockpit, United Flight 93 crashed into an open field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, about twenty minutes flying time from Washington, DC. All souls onboard perished.

* * *

As I was considering the “pillars” of democracy, I thought about that vote.

It was the foundation of everything, laid bare. If you strip away the rule of law, the earnestness of the dissenter’s alarm, the separation of powers, and the sworn allegiances of those who should protect us from a mortal menace — all four pillars gone, which is essentially what happened that morning — then what remains is a bedrock notion. The whole cathedral of American liberty has been held up by a simple foundation: a free people, governing themselves, even when nothing and no one is left to help them.

This is what’s called “popular sovereignty.” Determinations about our destiny belong to us, the populace, not any leader. We merely cede them our power, temporarily, to make decisions on our behalf. No document or branch of government can wrest that power away from us. The plain, unkillable fact is that in America, authority runs upward, from the people. What the people grant, only the people can withdraw.

This is why it’s not strictly a pillar. A pillar can be toppled. This week, I’ve shown you four of them starting to buckle, or crumble altogether, and how in recent times, we’ve never seen the supports so weakened. But the ground itself can’t be toppled. You can’t knock down the earth. Sovereignty can only be surrendered. In the worst case, it can be handed over by a people, if they’ve decided once and for all that they’d rather binge watch the destruction than govern themselves.

“What do we mean by the Revolution?” John Adams once asked Thomas Jefferson, decades after the conflict that created the United States of America. “The war? That was no part of the Revolution. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected... before a drop of blood was shed.”

In other words, the Revolution was not the battles. It had already happened by that point, among ordinary people. When they stopped believing they were subjects and started knowing they were citizens, they broke free.

By the same token, the survival of democracy won’t be determined by the president jailing his critics, sending his soldiers into our cities, or stamping his face on our money. Those are terrible acts, to be sure, but they’re the consequences of a bigger choice. A self-governing people already made the decision to return that man to the nation’s highest office. An autocrat is downstream of the abdication. That also means our renaissance, if we have one, will flow from the same place. Us, not the marble.

Alexander Hamilton said it floridly, in 1775, when he was barely twenty years old.

“The sacred rights of mankind,” he wrote, “are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”

Do you see what he saw?

Even just a ray of it, peeking through the dark woods? The rights aren’t in the parchment. The parchment documented what was already true. Our self sovereignty. That truth is the foundation of our democracy. This is why the pillars can collapse entirely (and they might) — the whole building can come down in a heap — and it still won’t be the very end. The rights will remain, because they never lived in the stone. I’m not saying a collapse would be easy to recover from. Only that it would be feasible.

Someone will tell you this is the worst it’s ever been. They’re wrong. Earlier in this series, I re-introduced you to Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery in the 1830s. Let me return to him for one moment. Before he was the conscience of a nation, he was a fugitive who was hunted, homeless, and with no law to shelter him and no court to hear him. I highlighted the passage, below, in my copy of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and paste it here in order to transport you into another moment that was far worse than now:

“Trust no man!” I saw in every white man an enemy, and in almost every colored man cause for distrust. It was a most painful situation; and, to understand it, one must needs experience it, or imagine himself in similar circumstances. Let him be a fugitive slave in a strange land — a land given up to be the hunting-ground for slaveholders — whose inhabitants are legalized kidnappers — where he is every moment subjected to the terrible liability of being seized upon by his fellowmen, as the hideous crocodile seizes upon his prey! — I say, let him place himself in my situation — without home or friends — without money or credit — wanting shelter, and no one to give it — wanting bread, and no money to buy it, — and at the same time let him feel that he is pursued by merciless men-hunters, and in total darkness as to what to do, where to go, or where to stay, — perfectly helpless both as to the means of defense and means of escape, — in the midst of plenty, yet suffering the terrible gnawings of hunger, — in the midst of houses, yet having no home, — among fellowmen, yet feeling as if in the midst of wild beasts, whose greediness to swallow up the trembling and half-famished fugitive is only equalled by that with which the monsters of the deep swallow up the helpless fish upon which they subsist, — I say, let him be placed in this most trying situation, — the situation in which I was placed, — then, and not till then, will he fully appreciate the hardships of, and know how to sympathize with, the toil-worn and whip-scarred fugitive slave.

This might be one of the tamer descriptions of the mass horror that spread across our land. How can someone tell you that today is worse than what our nation experienced in yesteryear? How can such a cynical mind claim that we are “hopeless” in the age of Trump, when we crawled out of that hellhole? Why cannot we climb out of this one? A free people, including that formerly enslaved man, worked their way up and out of a horror that makes our present trial look small.

We have stood on far shakier ground than this, and we did not run or surrender the foundation.

I will close by sharing a personal philosophy. It’s been said in other ways through time, though here’s how I conceive of it: Nature destroys everything it creates, but it creates from everything it destroys. Perhaps we’ll lose the whole building. That would be quite a trial. Yet from the rubble, a free people can always, always, always build again. If we choose to. That’s the promise beneath each personal ruin in our own lives or a once-in-a-century national catastrophe. We’re not doomed. We’re never doomed. We retain the option to rebuild.

And this is the choice the 250th sets up. There’s no fifth pillar to protect us from the discomfort of a hard decision. We can look at what has been done to the law, the voice, the structure, the oath, and be so revolted that we resolve (in the same place revolutions begin) to withdraw our consent from a man who would be king. Or we can accept our station as the drowsy subjects of a declining power, scrolling past our own destiny.

The forty people on Flight 93 didn’t have to decide what kind of Americans they were. They decided in minutes what most of us have been given years to weigh. Every institution had failed them, in ways they would never even know, and they cast the last vote available to a free people. They voted to act. In doing so, they saved the very house where the people’s government still sits today and where it’s being corrupted by a wannabe dictator.

Their vote is now ours. It comes due every single day, in a thousand small and unglamorous decisions about whether to keep the faith. When a free people find that democracy’s pillars appear at risk of collapsing, they must decide whether to fight or flee. There’s only one right answer in my view. It’s the kind of resolve that was delivered by a man named Todd, who turned to his fellow Americans and asked if they were ready. They nodded. His two-word instruction is now passed from those forty souls to all three hundred and forty million of us, on the eve of our 250th year.

Let’s roll.

---

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

Feel free to forward this to others on the occasion of the 250th.