American democracy is not made out of the marble pillars in Washington, D.C.

American democracy is not measured by the strength of our No. 1 economy or our No. 1 military.

And it’s not guaranteed by what the Founders wrote 250 years ago on pieces of paper.

Our self-government is nothing more solid than an idea.

It’s like Tinker Bell: if we believe in our representative government, then it lives on. If we stop believing in it, it fades away among our personal daily distractions of shopping for groceries, answering e-mails and getting the kids to practice.

Many Americans have felt this fragility in the most recent 10 years of American history. I hope it’s some comfort to say: we’ve been here before. History records that our self-government has failed twice since the Declaration of Independence. The first form of our democracy outlined by the Continental Congress failed within 10 years, which caused the redo in Philadelphia in 1787 that gave us the U.S. Constitution. Then our government and society fell apart in the 1850s, and it took a civil war to rededicate what our self-government meant.

Since 1999, I’ve tried to tell historical stories as if the reader is living through them in the present tense. Because no tomorrow is guaranteed. No success is guaranteed. We all have choices to make today that will lead to other choices tomorrow. And then someone else later will look back and call our choices “history.” In 2023 and 2024, it felt time to take a closer look at the choices Americans made in the 1850s that chipped away at our representative democracy until finally someone chose to fire artillery at a U.S. Army fort in South Carolina.

My new “CIVIL or WAR?” is my third Choice Comic and is meant for readers a bit older than my “Civil War, vol. 1” and “Civil War, vol. 2” books speak to. Here is where a middle school or high school student can consider the hard questions that we all still grapple with today: What does it mean to be a citizen of the United States? How big or small should a group of voters be to feel like self-government really answers to what we want? How do we balance the wants of the majority of citizens with the civil rights of the minority of citizens?

I hope you enjoy the storytelling. Because “history” never ends . . .

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 25th, 2024 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Author's Purpose. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.