“A Land of Promise Will Invariably Be a Land of Promises Unkept”

That’s not my line, I wish it was. That’s Frank Bruni, a great NYTimes columnist, writing on ‘Jan. 6 and America’s broken spirit.’ I happen to think our spirit is probably bent and stretched, but only time will tell.

But there’s much to be considered in that statement.

Throughout much of our history, most of the world has considered America as the promised land and many still do, no matter our current failings. We need to remember that. My own family’s American experiment takes my mother’s side back to the Civil War, where my grand-uncle lost an arm fighting with the Illinois militia. My mother’s job as a child was to wash his hand before dinner. On my dad’s side, his father immigrated from Canada just after that war.

Both my grandfathers were English and both grandmothers German, so the Freeman name hasn’t a long personal history in America, but the English ‘freeman’ suggests we were originally serfs tilling the land.

Immigrants to America, mostly from Europe, arrived and sheltered thems…