Percolation

I've been having some thoughts bubbling up recently, and I thought I'd put them out there.  It kind of started when I commented on Tim's blog entry about modern political tea parties.  The bulk of my response wasn't so much about the tea parties, but about the recent HBO miniseries John Adams adapted from the biography written by David McCullough.  

I really liked parts of it, and hated other parts when I watched it.  Here is this great man, that had so much to do with gaining our independence from Britain in getting the continental congress to join together to sign off on the Declaration.  And then he is sent to be an ambassador to France where his talents and abilities are absolutely wasted.  He was ill treated by Benjamin Franklin in France, the same man who had guided him to success back in Philadelphia.  That made me sick.  Then he is sent to Great Britain after the war to be ambassador there, and he starts getting all these imperial notions. When he finally gets back to America, his children are grown and he hardly knows them at all. He wasn't around for the composition of the Constitution either.  He struggled as Vice President under Washington, trying to be useful, yet stay out of the political machinations between Jefferson and Hamilton.

The strife between Jefferson and Adams grew when Adams was elected President.  Looking at it, it never made sense how the second place candidate became Vice President.  Jefferson and Adams were friends, yet they had very different political views, and Jefferson totally undermined Adams.  He had these very negative pamphlets published about Adams.  It was disgusting.  And then there were Adams later years as his family kind of fell apart.  So sad.  But then he bit the bullet and made the first gesture to reconcile with Jefferson.  They corresponded back and forth for their last few years.  On the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, both men died within hours of each other.

There is a scene near the end of the series where Adams and his son John Quincy view the famous painting by John Trumbull of the signing.  He criticized the painting for being inaccurate.  The Continental Congress was not so neatly organized or seemingly serene.  It was filled with regular men, with regular passions and short comings.  And looking back, I know why I hated the series in parts.  It didn't jive with the common perception I had of the Founding Fathers.  In my mind, they had been nearly deified.  But they were, in fact, just men.

This is what triggered the thoughts I've had recently.  The Founding Fathers were not gods, they were imperfect, regular men.  But they lived during extraordinary times, and were called upon to do extraordinary things.  And they did them.  They accomplished great things.  So often we tell ourselves that we could never achieve great things.  We don't count ourselves worthy or able to do these things.  But that is because we think of our heroes as being otherworldly.  We see in ourselves our own weaknesses, but those who accomplish great things we think of as being nearly perfect.  But they are not perfect.  On the flip side, when we find out that our heroes made terrible mistakes, we discount the great things they did do.  It is important for us to come to terms with this dichotomy within everyone, but especially ourselves.  Not to minimize our own accountability, but to realize that even though we are not perfect, that is no reason to despair and count ourselves out.