The Promise (One Sixty-Two: Day 73)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day Seventy-Three: Chipper Jones, Atlanta Braves

On this day, Americans gather to celebrate the most famous press release in the history of the world. When it was signed on July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence announced to the colonists, the mother country, and the rest of the world that America was going to become its own nation, no matter how much bloodshed this required.

In drafting this announcement, the Founding Fathers elaborated on the kind of country they wished to create. It would be a nation based on the principles of liberty and equality, they told us. When writing the words “all men are created equal,” the Philadelphia patriots chose to make this Declaration more than just a pronouncement. They chose to make it a promise.

Throughout the past 234 years, Americans have harkened back to the Declaration whenever they’ve found our country failing to deliver on that sacred promise. The boldness and beauty of “all men are created equal” has stood watch over the decisions we’ve made as a nation. After decades of slavery, Abraham Lincoln cited the Declaration as the country moved to turn things right. After nearly a century and a half of women lacking the right to vote, the Seneca Falls Convention used the Declaration to show us where America had fallen short. After nearly 200 years of discrimination and segregation toward African-Americans, Martin Luther King quoted from the Declaration in his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in the summer of 1963.

The United States of America was founded on the highest standards of freedom and acceptance. And in reaching for those standards, we the people have often taken two steps forward, followed by one step backward. From race to gender to class to disability, our nation has expanded its guarantees of equality in many ways over the years. But at the same time, we find individuals across our nation reminding us of the many ways in which we’ve denied equality. In recent years, for instance, we’ve heard from immigration activists in Arizona, from gay-rights activists across the country, from advocates for the poor in our inner cities, and from Arab Americans facing discrimination across the country.

We are a complex people, with a complex history. Take today’s Atlanta Braves home game in Turner Field, for instance. When the Braves host the Marlins today, they will do so in an integrated Southern city, where any visitor can pay a visit to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site. The Braves will field a team featuring white, Latino, African-American and Asian players. The team’s makeup features everything Thomas Jefferson might have hoped America could become.

And yet, at the same time, the Braves will play today’s game in a state that just nine years ago chose to remove the Confederate Battle Flag from part of its own state flag. What’s more, when the Braves take the field they will wear an image of a tomahawk on their jerseys – a weapon of choice for the Native Americans who had their own freedom and humanity stripped from them in the early years of this republic. Finally, if the Braves start a rally during their game today, and star third baseman Chipper Jones steps to the plate, the fans will no doubt begin their famous “Tomahawk Chop.” With this chop, the fans will move their right arms downward like tomahawks, to depict the scalping that they hope their Braves will inflict on those Marlins. This, in spite of the fact that vast numbers of Native Americans still live on isolated reservations, in a constant struggle with poverty and substance abuse.

It’s a complex nation, all right. We have a hard time delivering consistently on that promise of 234 years ago. There are times each day when we see ourselves and others falling far short of the expectations inside that press release. And yet the promise remains. It always has, ever inching us forward.

In our best moments as Americans, we look for ways to work together in hopes of taking that next step. In those moments, we march together in the direction of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Our unalienable rights. The promise of a nation. It is there, in Turner Field and every field. From sea to shining sea. Beckoning us onward, where liberty stands ready to shine.