Achieving Our Country: PEOPLEINBLACK: IMAGES FROM BLACK FLAG WEEK

The promise of the United States,

its vision and ideals, as set forth in its founding documents (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America) are best understood as "works in progress." The United States' failure throughout its history to live up to the lofty standards codified in those founding documents in no way lessens their meaning, nor their value. The good that the United States has in fact achieved since 1776 has served to reinforce the idea of a country striving, by design, to be better than its all-too-human and very imperfect nature. Most important, those ideals exist as real, true things that We, the People can achieve. It's the hopeful intent of this site to discuss and facilitate ways of actually achieving our nation, and thereby continue to form, as the Constitution exhorts, a more perfect union.

The title ''Achieving Our Country''

is drawn from the famous last sentence of James Baldwin's ''Fire Next Time.'' There, Baldwin called on the saving remnant, ''the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks,'' to ''end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.'' The point of invoking James Baldwin, of course, is that he was entirely unforgiving of his country's sins and still looked forward with hope to a better future. A left that fights for the political and economic changes that will ''achieve our country'' is the left that the United States once possessed and needs as much as ever, but is hardly to be seen.
--from a book review: "The New New Left"
by Alan Ryan