MAG-A?

Former Attorney General Eric Holder, under president Obama, was on MSNBC's "The Beat with Ari Melber" yesterday. He was asked the following: “There is a lot of talk about America being a leader as a democracy, quote unquote, in the 1800s when women and African-Americans couldn’t vote. What kind of democracy is that?”

Holder’s response was, "That's exactly right . . . I think to myself, ‘exactly when did you think America was great’? It certainly wasn’t when people were enslaved. It certainly wasn’t when women didn’t have the right to vote. It certainly wasn’t when the LGBT community was denied the rights to which it was entitled."

As a high school student I occasionally refrained from saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Why? Because I deeply resented the racial prejudice I had witnessed in a small town my family had lived in temporarily just before - and this was my big statement about it. My teacher thought it was cool.

A couple of years later I was enrolled at a respected Methodist college with a small, but fairly global population. It also hosted resident and visiting missionaries. It was there that I began to appreciate how great America really is. She deserved my respect despite her imperfections.

What I heard there were numerous accounts of how liberties we take for granted were abridged in the home countries represented. A female pastor, for example, reported that spies regularly monitored her sermons for unacceptable political speech, under threat of arrest. Foreign missionaries spoke of torture and abuse for the “crime” of Christianity.

I also knew the family of a man who was in the election process of becoming Prime Minister of their country. In those intervening months, his family was in America for their safety. They, however, received regular heartbreaking updates of those killed in the political strife back home.

So to answer the former AG’s question, I came to realize – at 20 years of age – that America wasn’t bad because she was imperfect. Nor was she bad because she had committed grave mistakes. As in the case of slavery, our greatness includes the determination to examine our policies, identify any that are wrong – and then set about the difficult process of getting on the right course.

In sum, America always has been – and always will be - far from perfect. But those friends who had lived in very different cultures appreciated America’s freedoms and longed for the day when they might have just a bit of the same “back home.”