They remained in our documents but began a slow and tortured exit from our hearts. The very tyrannies from which we had fought to be free would reappear among us, and this time we were the oppressors as well as the oppressed. We expanded our physical territory and our commitment to freedom, applying our highest ideals as we abolished slavery, gave women the right to vote, banned child labor, and in many other ways remained true to the goal of an expanding democracy. Had the Industrial Revolution, with its gargantuan focus on material power, not occurred, then the magnificence of our original ideals might have continued to pull us upward and out of the devolutionary lure of history. But it did occur, and while it allowed the world phenomenal opportunity for the eradication of material suffering, it also clearly fostered our spiritual forgetfulness.
Material progress become an American god.
To look in our national mirror is to see both glory and shame. Born of a stunning assertion of the human spirit in the face of tyranny, we then built a nation on the blood of Native Americans and slaves from Africa. We are blessed with more money and more technological resources than any other nation of the world, yet we give only six-tenths of 1 percent of our budget away to nations less fortunate than we. We are a nation that loves to say how much we love our children, yet children are less well cared for in America than in any of our industrialized counterparts. America has always been a land of contradictions.