siesiegirl:

standbyyourmantis:

I think the hardest thing for Americans to reconcile this idea of the Founding Fathers as flawed people who still did good things.

Washington was a slave owner who came to have mixed feelings on it later in life, but at one point he was literally the only thing standing between democracy and a military dictatorship (immediately after the Revolution the army hadn’t been paid in years and they were talking of storming the capitol and taking over, Washington defused the situation).

I don’t think I have to list all the things Jefferson did, but he did still also write the Declaration of Independence.

Madison was a slave owner but he and Hamilton were instrumental in the Constitution being ratified and he also worked on the Bill of Rights.

Hamilton was a temperamental asshat who cheated on his wife repeatedly and would destroy people for petty grievances. He was also an abolitionist.

They all did good things and bad things and it’s really hard to wrap your mind around the vast gulf that should come between “literally owned people” and “set up a form of government that protected the rights of its citizens against the power structures for basically one of the first times since antiquity.” (edit because I forgot about the Iroquois Confederacy) And most people will choose one extreme or the other. Either they were all universally terrible for slavery (which was terrible) or they were brilliant defenders of the people (which they were for certain people). The best you’ll usually get is an acknowledgement that they were “complex” but that doesn’t really mean much when we’re talking about these extremes.

The truth is that ultimately they did both and we have to at some point learn to accept that there were no demons or saints. Some were worse than others, but they all did awful things because they were ultimately fallible humans and by trying to reduce them to caricatures we turn them into talking points (“what did the Founders MEAN by ‘bear arms?’”) and these strange sort of deities whose words we have to interpret as best we can or else as devils who need to be conquered. They were literally just people who did fucked up things that they thought were okay and did some pretty cool things that we should try to hold onto.

Except for Andrew Jackson. Fuck that guy.

The world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters…