What Happened?

[DemocratSinceBirth]

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.

[bucolic_frolic]

1. Now it's Alcatraz with gilt. /nt

[markpkessinger]

2. That is a quote from Ronald Reagan's farewell speech . . .

. . . The original use of the phrase "city on a hill" was from a sermon by Puritan John Winthrop in 1630, speaking of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But Winthrop's Sermon was not some kind of celebration of what the colony would become. On the contrary, it was a warning! Winthrop wrote:

"For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going."

[bucolic_frolic]

3. Gov. Mario Cuomo alluded to the shining city in the 1984 DNC Keynote Address.

Full transcript: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/01/02/374529943/watch-mario-cuomos-1984-speech-to-democratic-convention

[markpkessinger]

4. Cuomo got it wrong, too.

Here's a 2014 article from the journal, Foreign Policy, that explains:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150405163157/https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/03/17/winthrops-warning/