One of my very best and longest-time friends and I enjoyed a good walk on the beach this week, and we mostly talked about old times and the health problems of the aging (us) and what and how our children are doing and what a nice day it is almost any day in San Diego. He lives on the Atlantic side of the continent, so he knows a thing or two about checking the weather forecast and making contingency plans before scheduling an outdoor wedding. Because I live with eternally wonderful San Diego weather, it never occurs to me to worry that rain might interrupt any parade, barbeque, or bike ride I write into my schedule. My friend and I finally got around to talking politics. He has always been a “real” Republican, and I have always been a left-wing, bleeding heart, liberal Democrat. We are a bit like the guys in Frost’s “Mending Wall” who meet each year to walk the fence line between their properties to make repairs. We came quickly to the issue that we have discussed ad nauseam for at least fifty years. As always, argumentum ad nauseam still gets us nowhere. I can’t understand how he, one of the best human beings I know on this earth, can insist that while the “pursuit of happiness” is guaranteed in this country, every citizen has “got to catch it for himself.” Those are not the words of my friend and he didn’t use them in our conversation, but they are words I heard Christine O’Donnell, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck use and credit to none other than Benjamin Franklin. Actually, a little fact checking will turn up plenty of evidence that old Ben said no such thing or at least there is no record of his having done so; although stories about a mythical Franklin, like some of the stories about a mythical George Washington who was quite unlike our first president, crop up at political rallies regularly. My friend can’t understand why I persist in letting my bleeding heart get in the way of allowing poor, broken-down, sick citizens to pull themselves up by their boot straps, thereby becoming stronger rather than weaker, the inevitable consequence of relying on the welfare state to give a helping hand. One of my favorite examples of putting words into Ben Franklin’s mouth sounds as if it’s going to be a typical bar joke. There is this drunk coming out of a bar who runs into Mr. Franklin going in... The drunk says, “Where is the happiness the Declaration of Independence says I have coming to me”? Mr. Franklin says back to him, “It doesn’t come to you, you have to catch it yourself.” There is absolutely no historical record crediting that story or that saying to Benjamin Franklin. Like many others needed for political expediency in political stump speeches, it got made up out of whole cloth.

But that’s not my point. My point is that we have come to a time when Tea Party enthusiasts are rewriting the history of the United States, and it’s getting harder and harder for the ordinary, not-a-scholar citizen to know what is the real historical record and what is a story made up to embellish a real event in order to make that event seem relevant to some contemporary issue. Sometimes political hopefuls don't go far back to rewrite history. Mr. Huckabee's made-up story last week that President Obama's grew up in Kenya is a good example of rewriting even recent history the way one wishes it had been. So in my thinking about these issues, if I have the presence of mind to remember, I fall back on sources that predate Colonial America. Sacred texts of the world’s major religions, especially those of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, are clear about the importance of charity, of putting one’s self in the place of the suffering other. There is much more in the New Testament for Christians to rely on as instruction for living with our neighbors and even our enemies than there is about hell or heaven as punishment or reward; yet the emphasis on what stretches out eternally beyond those pearly gates and reminders of a hell with everlasting burning and suffering seem to Fundamentalist Christians to be more important than the clear message of Jesus about right living in relation to others. There isn’t much in the “Old Testament” to justify Israeli abuse of Palestinian neighbors; and it’s a real stretch to use any of the stories from the Koran to justify wholesale murder of innocents in jihad.

So we persist in rewriting history and reinterpreting ancient religious texts to justify whatever we have as agenda for our own times. Perhaps our best hope for security and for peace is to do what my friend and I did this week. Walk and talk and recommit to the friendship and love that binds us to each other.