Washington's Birthday Deserves To Be Its Own Holiday | Opinion

The image of America as a great nation, the hope of humankind, is not very much in vogue these days. Our common sense of greatness has been eclipsed by naysayers and academic nabobs who argue our democratic experiment is failing, not by choice but by design.

To them, this failure is the result of choices made just as soon as the first permanent European settlements were established on these shores in the early 17th century. America, as "the land of the free and the home of the brave," never had a chance.

They're wrong, of course. America is a success as well as a continuing experiment. Our efforts to perfect our system of self-government will last as long as we continue to value concepts like liberty, freedom of conscience, and the idea that we are all created in a common image.

It used to be a consensus belief that, in America, we each had it within ourselves to rise above our circumstances. Now, it's more common to find people believing they are confined by circumstances beyond their control, blocked from moving on and moving up by invisible roadblocks they cannot see and, therefore, cannot get around.

That is nonsense, mostly. We as a nation are constantly on the lookout for systemic bias in need of correction. When we find it, we fix it. Or at least try to, which puts us head and shoulders above other nations.

America's excellence, its exceptionalism, used to be embodied in the spirit of George Washington, whose birthday is observed today. At one time, it was an occasion for parades, speeches, and living lessons in history about the man who led our nation from bondage to freedom.

"First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen," went the eulogy. And, back when his picture hung in every classroom, and the nation's Founders were treated with greater reverence than they are now, he was. For anyone who cares to consider his life and legacy, he remains inspirational, a giant among men, dedicated to the proposition that freedom matters.

Today, too many people are blinded by their own prejudices to see him for what he was. His significance has diminished because we have allowed it to, beginning with the move to combine the annual observance of his birthday with Abraham Lincoln's to produce a "Presidents' Day" weekend.

Washington would, I suspect, be the first to cast doubt on his greatness. His humility was legendary and, more than once, saved a nascent republic from being strangled in its infancy. What he wrote and said about the need to impose limits on the power of the government remains relevant today, perhaps more so than at any time since his own. His wise leadership protected a new nation as it grew to become the greatest, most free, most prosperous, most generous society ever to exist. All this despite his failure, as was common and at the time acceptable, to embrace fully and without deviation the Jeffersonian promise of equality for all.

The notion of equal justice under law for all still has not been realized. We may get there someday as men of the caliber of Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others build upon Washington's legacy. Democracy, he taught us, is a process, not a certainty. The cultural commentators and pseudo-academics who want now to pull down the statues erected in his honor and force the rest of us to confront his slave-holding past at the expense of all his achievements do us no service.

They have made talk of his greatness unfashionable, an unfortunate development in a country that might not have been had he not led its fight for independence. Washington, the man was once a venerated American institution, purposefully set apart from men who followed him into the presidency. Even those who do not subscribe to the so-called "Great Man" theory of history must acknowledge his centrality to the creation and survival of a nation founded on the idea of liberty that changed the world for the better.

Someone should have foreseen, or at least warned of, the dangers inherent in putting an end to the annual observance of Washington's birthday. We need a national day to consider the man, his flaws—which were mercifully few—and his greatness. He deserves a special place of honor. What we have now is too easy to overlook. We can use Washington, his memory, as well as his legacy to bring the people together. It is a worthwhile goal, one he would have understood and approved.

Newsweek Contributing Editor Peter Roff is a veteran journalist who can be seen and read frequently on U.S. and international media platforms. He can be reached at roffcolumns@gmail.com and followed on social media @TheRoffDraft.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.