Cameron Brown: America’s Ghost of Christmas Future

Charles Dickens could not have imagined the enduring influence of his novella, “A Christmas Carol.” Its timeless message of redemption is rooted in the heart of the first Christmas. Each ghost Ebenezer Scrooge encounters builds the narrative to the ultimate denouement of a transformed life.

The lessons learned from each spirit are lessons for individuals and nations alike. America’s "Ghost of Christmas Past" reveals a brave and gallant general crossing an ice-jammed river on his way to victory and the birth of a new nation. Like Dickens' young Ebenezer, the genesis of our nation was full of promise. It’s the Ghost of Christmas Present that disturbs us. The hopes and dreams of America’s Founding seem muted and far distant to us today. Institutions entrusted to protect our freedoms have lost the trust of the people because they themselves have lost their way.

The debacle of Arizona’s elections is symptomatic of the abandonment of principle for the sake of power at all costs. The standard of Christmas past is now eclipsed by the ill winds of greed and a perverse disdain for American exceptionalism. President Lincoln’s secretary, John Nicolay said patriotism is the “vital breath of a nation. When patriotism dies, the nation dies.” If the events of today go without correction—“if these shadows remain unaltered,” Dickens’ last apparition would tell us—it will portend a foreboding future. But if corrected, there is hope!

From Brazil to Beijing to Maricopa County, “People everywhere just wanna be free.” America's Ebenezers must recapture that vital breath of the nation not for America alone, but for the world. Standing in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall in February of 1861 on the occasion of President Washington’s birthday, President-Elect Abraham Lincoln gave perspective on the exceptional role he understood to be America’s calling. “It was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies from the motherland,” he said, “but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men.”

The shadows that have been cast over Lincoln's noble words portend ill for our country. If America is to be the redeemer nation Lincoln envisioned it to be, we must not let these shadows remain unaltered by the future, for there is no other America waiting in the wings. The future is responsibly in our hands to shape and mold for generations yet born.

— Cameron S. Brown is president of the Kalamazoo Abraham Lincoln Institute and a former Michigan State Senator. Follow him at HistoryFrontiers.blog.

This article originally appeared on Sturgis Journal: Cameron Brown: America’s Ghost of Christmas Future