The Founding Mothers

These major rebel dudes marshaled a scrawny, patched-together, hungry crew—barely what you’d call an army—and they manned-up in a major dust-up with Great Britain, sporting the greatest army on earth.  With red coats.  A snappy marching band.  And commanders who spoke the King’s English.  The founding dudes shook rebel fists at royalty.  And they hurled royal words at the royal ass.  And then they kicked royalty’s ass when royalty came kicking.  Rich, eloquent, tough, scrappy, victorious rebels:  the poster dudes for Masculinity.  They stood up to the greedy, small-minded, power-drunk King of England and kicked his royal sycophants off the continent.  Masculinity at its very finest.  They were major badasses who risked it all for truth, justice, and the American way.

These victorious rich guys had plenty of manly options, as victors have had since the fall of Atlantis.  They could have formed an oligarchy club, members only, and owned everything worth owning.  They could have taken turns being king.  Maybe some supremely Machiavellian player could have claimed the throne for life.  Or they could have made a back door deal with King George, and pocketed buckets of gold by wheeling, dealing, and subterfuge.  Yup, they had options, lots of cushy, self-indulgent options.  All such opportunities would have been well within the bounds of the historically condoned, masculine birthright.

But not so fast.  These badass, musket-loading, kick-em-when-they’re-not-looking founding revolutionaries studied philosophy and botany and astronomy and history and yet more philosophy and they embraced the Scottish Enlightenment, read French and Latin and Greek and Hebrew, parsed fine wine, wore wigs and knickers, and wrote long letters to each other.  How masculine is all that highfalutin French fuss and fancy continental lingo?

They declared independence.  They won a war against all odds.  They had lots of choices.  But what did they want?

They wanted the citizens of this new nation to bounce off their rich, powerful, intelligent shoulders.

They argued about how to pack that punch, and spawn that bounce.  And spawn they did, with over three hundred million great-great-great-great grandchildren bouncing around nearly a quarter of a millennium later.  Even if the great grandkids are not all so great.  Anyway, some turned out really great!  Some didn’t!  Some are really horrible!  And no matter how you rate the grandkids, the whole messy, crazy, miraculous enterprise they spawned still bounces like crazy.

It didn’t have to.  It wasn’t guaranteed.  We could have been like Brazil for the past three centuries.  Nothing against Brazil, but as far as an idea with big bounce in multiple realms—starting with the political—well, the United States has been as bouncy as it gets these past few centuries.

So these Founding Fathers debated how to give their power away for the greater good.  By contemporary standards, the rich guys who gave their power away for the greater good while studying philosophy in a foreign language would appear to be extreme east coast, softy, smarty-pants-know-it-all-elites who would never get elected.  But these present day unelectables are the very ones who agreed to give their power away and imbue this new nation with world-class bounce.

And herein hides—in plain view—the kernel of our miraculous national inception:  the rich guys gave their power away.  That’s what happened.  No one made them.  Never happened before, not in any history I’ve ever read.  This is amazing, and bears repeating:  the rich guys gave their power away, and nobody made them do it.

Certainly, they were not saints.  And neither are most saints, now that you mention it.  But that’s not the point.  The point is that the guys who had it all, and could have grabbed more, opted for less.

With philosophical winds at their back, and the sunshine of the common good on their faces, they opted to give their power away.

Quick pause for context:  the 1770s are closer to the Middle Ages than to modernity.  Do the math. About 250 years have passed since the incipient murmurings of the American Revolution in 1770.  So consider that 250 years on the other side of 1770 would put you in the year 1520, which was during the Renaissance, which was dangerously close to the Middle Ages when guys and horses jousted in metal outfits and women wore metal chastity belts.

The Founding Fathers were looking forward, though, a good 250 years or more, which is what more people should try now, but that’s another story.  The Founding Fathers paid attention to the Scottish Enlightenment in particular, in which it was established that the divine right of kings was bullshit and that individual people had value, pure and simple, because they were people, and if the king had a problem with that, he could appeal to a mirror.

Their place in time does add context, yet these revolutionaries ultimately transcended context, and the proof of that transcendence is the ongoing viability and vitality of the political entity they argued into existence.  It is now, in its third century, one of the world’s oldest and most stable existing governments.  Nobody could have imagined that a system devised when kings had divine rights and slavery was the norm would thrive in the space age.  And it was not the battlefield victory that resulted in such longevity.  The viability and vitality of the government they created emerged not from muskets and ambushes but from mind and spirit and language and desire.

Let’s say that these Founding Dudes were victorious twice:  on the battlefield, and on the conceptual field.  And let’s take a fresh gander at these unusually paired accomplishments, and see where they fall on the spectrum of masculine and feminine engagements with life.  This is dicey ground, as no clearly defined distinctions separate masculine and feminine.  Yet we all understand that the differences exist.  And obviously, victory at war exemplifies masculinity.  When you consider “feminine victory” it tends to be broader, more subtle and nuanced than the clearly scored victories enjoyed by masculine energy.

In terms of our rich guys who won the war and gave their power away, consider the arc of their engagement from victory in war to depth of thought (rather than power-mongering) in the aftermath.  Such achievement in war rarely, if ever, manifests as a profoundly humane and active adaptation of philosophy.  And in spanning this arc from warfare to brainstorming, they also spanned the interface with life from masculine to feminine.  Yes, the Founding Fathers expressed their essential feminine nature as they pondered and grappled and argued and compromised their way to forming a nation based on ideas that honor human potential.

Which brings us to the Case of the Founding Mothers.  That’s right, the United States was founded by moms.  Moms who were also dads.  Because the Founding Fathers who mothered a nation were imbued with bountiful masculine energy as well as bountiful feminine energy.  Both.  They embraced both persuasions, both of these primary interfaces with life.  They roamed far and wide in each of these dimensions, and we are the beneficiaries.

They defeated the bad guys, and in victory they gave their power away.

For over two centuries, we’ve been extolling the Founding Fathers.  As well we should have.  But, we underestimated them.  They were also the Founding Mothers, and in this sense, they broke the glass ceiling in the eighteenth century.

So here we are in the twenty-first century.  The feminine energy of our Founding Mothers has lain dormant too long.  We can still have the mightiest army on earth.  But that’s not enough to live the life the Founding Moms envisioned.  Let’s revive the essentially feminine devotion to human potential that got us here in the first place.  Women can be assertive, and men can nurture.  And thus we can choose leaders—be they women or men—who express our essence with a depth of thought and consideration that the Founding Mothers manifested.