
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 4, 1990                   TAG: 9007050188
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: HOLIDAY 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

AMERICA REMAINS THE CITY ON THE HILL

ON JULY 4, 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court had just held that flag burning is protected by the First Amendment as a form of political expression. Only weeks before, mainland China had brutally suppressed dissenters gathered in Tiananmen Square under a replica of the Statue of Liberty. Americans were wondering, too, whether a few signs of democratization in Eastern Europe, mainly Poland, ever would amount to much.

A year later, much is the same.

The Supreme Court has held that a congressional flag-burning law, enacted to nullify the 1989 decision, is no less unconstitutional than the Texas law overturned the year before. As in 1989, the American people seem to have concluded that spanking a few childish flag-burners, however tempting, isn't worth messing with the Bill of Rights.

China remains a closed, despotic nation, despite President Bush's offering of such carrots as restoration of most-favored-nation trading status.

But in Eastern Europe . . . wow!

Who a year ago could have imagined that not only Poland but also Hungary and Czechoslovakia would have non-communist leaders, freely elected in multiparty competition? That East and West Germany would have a united currency and a merged market-oriented economy? That even Bulgaria and Romania, though not moving nearly so far as their neighbors to the north, at least would have governments legitimized by reasonably honest elections?

America is not the only nation to whom fledgling democracies can turn for practical lessons in how to run free political systems. Nor is America the only nation whose birthing principle was the ideology of freedom and human rights, rather than a common ethnicity, a unifying religion or loyalty to crown.

America, however, is a rarity in that it is both. Britain is a democracy, to whom America owes more than the Founding Fathers may have recognized, but Britain was not conceived in democratic notions. Many Latin American nations were born of democratic impulses, but lose the way as often as not.

So it is to America that democrats across the globe look for inspiration. That perhaps is more evident in 1990 than in some years. The Soviet Union and its communist system, it has become clear even to the myopic, is no model for any nation to emulate. But America was the City on the Hill, the light of its freedom beckoning to the world, long before there was a Soviet Union.

Not, of course, that America is perfect. The litany of her sins is long, and can be dispiriting. But to chant the litany, particularly on Independence Day, is to miss the point that ideals are to be cherished even if they too often go unreached.

Because America is so self-consciously an apostle of freedom, her imperfections stand out all the more. The higher the standard, the easier it is to fall short. But it is better to fall short than to lower the standard.

by CNB