Today is a victory for many people, and a defeat for almost as many. The sun rose this morning and is still shining as I write these words, so clearly the more Biblical of the warnings we heard regarding this election have not come to pass.

Right now, we have no way of knowing what the broader lessons of the 2012 presidential election will be. I can certainly hope that the reelection of Barack Obama, as much as I may find fault with his presidency, is an affirmation of what I might call (in a secular sense) the better angels of our nature. Not everyone shares my beliefs and my views about what America is, what it can be, or what it should be, but I feel as though some of those views have been affirmed by the events of the past few weeks.

America, perhaps unlike any other nation in the world, is and always has been a work in progress. The American Revolution did not end with the Treaty of Paris in 1781, nor did the many conflicts within America end at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865. The American Revolution was not just a war fought with muskets. The United States of America is the revolution, and it continues to this day.

I do not just mean a revolution of people rising up against an unjust or oppressive ruler. I mean people rising up against prejudices and assumptions that may go back years or millennia, fighting to make the words “all men [and women] are created equal” actually be true.

For the past 147 years, we have mostly, and fortunately, fought this revolution in legislative chambers and courtrooms instead of on battlefields, but there is far to go still. Gender inequality was not eradicated by the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920. Racism and racial disparities did not disappear with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, nor with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Prejudice and legally-sanctioned marginalization of LGBT people did not go way after Lawrence v. Texas in 2003.

History is not an unbroken upward progression of human knowledge, technology, or freedom. Periods of prosperity or peace are punctuated by periods we pejoratively call “dark ages,” and to listen to some of the rhetoric of the past few months, some people seem to expect a new dark age to overtake America. From their particular perspective, perhaps they are right.

The irony of the modern era, let’s say 1990 onward for brevity’s sake, is that many of us, myself included, have a false sense of security about issues like equality and prosperity. Jim Crow laws are off the books, women have the right to vote, and a Black guy has been elected president [twice], I have heard people observe as a means of asking how such prejudices could still be a big deal. Racism, bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and any number of other prejudices are alive and well in America, but they’ve learned to dress well and talk pretty.

Part of the purpose of the American Revolution was the intellectual rebellion against the entrenched notions of nobility and class, which were prevalent in English society. A person was born into their class, and barring some serious stroke of fortune, that is where they remained for life. America was not entirely unique in presenting the possibility that everyone should have the opportunity to excel, but it led the pack in the 18th century, and it may still lead the pack today. Make no mistake, though: class is alive and well, and we came very close to instituting a new American nobility.

“Equal opportunity” does not mean a guarantee of “equal outcome,” whatever certain Republican politicians might claim. It means that a person’s chances in life should be determined by their ability, such as intelligence, strength, or talent, and not by the amount of wealth available to them at birth. Of course such a level of equality is likely impossible, but that is no reason not to try. Currently, a highly intelligent or talented child born into a poor family in an inner city neighborhood or a distant rural area has significantly less opportunity to excel than a child who can simply sign up for honors classes at the nearest school. We are all subject to a variety of genetic lotteries. Should our prospects for a better life be dictated by our innate abilities, or by the wealth of the individuals from whose loins we sprung?

America was also born, to an extent, from an understanding that building a nation requires working together. No one in this country has made it on their own. The entire Republican Party platform of this past year was built on deliberately twisting and subverting this very simple truth. We are in this thing together, and sometimes that means compromise, and sometimes it means sacrifice.

This is not the “shared sacrifice” by which the the not-exceptionally-wealthy take further hits to their livelihoods so the exceptionally wealthy can send more money to Bermuda. It is the shared sacrifice in which we understand that we have a clear interest in supporting one another. “Personal responsibility” is an important factor, but our discourse has been poisoned by the fallacy that people succeed and fail entirely through their own merits or faults. That is not true, it never has been, and it never will be. The people who willingly accept government assistance for themselves while trying to deny it to all others, espousing a distinction between themselves and those “others,” is proof enough of the fallaciousness of this idea. An America in which the wealthiest continue to grow wealthier while the least wealthy cannot afford consumer goods would not remain America for very long.

To compromise is to accept that you may not achieve or acquire everything you want, but you can reach an agreement with someone whose interests conflict with yours, and you both can live in peace. Many of the first “Americans” who arrived from Europe came here because they were unwilling to compromise their religious beliefs or practices with the societies in which they lived. The First Amendment later enshrined the right to the free exercise of religion, but some today have forgotten the responsibilities associated with that freedom or the necessity of compromise.

Religious oppression, by which the rights of a religious group are suppressed by a dominant group, remains a serious problem in much of the world. In America, it has become a mockery of the struggles faced by religious minorities around the world. To hear members of one religious group or another cry oppression because society at large has become accepting of LGBT people, or respects the rights of women to make choices about their own health, is frankly insulting to the multitudes of people who face imprisonment or death for their beliefs, or even merely the beliefs of the family or community into which they were born. The people in America who make these complaints do not face imprisonment, torture or death because of what they believe. At worst, they face a personal crisis of conscience. On one side of the scales, we have a woman trying to exercise control over her own decisions, and therefore her own life; a gay man or lesbian who simply wants the freedom to choose with whom to spend their lives without government interference; or a transgender person seeking basic affirmation of their humanity. Balancing that with the religious beliefs of an entirely separate and otherwise unaffected person, however deeply-held those beliefs may be, is no balance at all. None.

Try this:

-Go up to a person who does not have health insurance, who recently lost a job, and who was just paralyzed after being hit by a drunk driver, and tell them that neither you nor anybody else has any obligation to help them. When they end up on the street, be sure to tell them to get a job and blame them for their plight.

– Go up to a gay couple who wants to get married. Tell them that, no matter how in love they may be, no matter how happy they may make each other, no matter what hopes or dreams they may have for a future together, your personal religious beliefs are more important to this nation than their right to decide how to live their own lives. Tell them that your relationship with your god is more important than their right to visit one another in the hospital should one of them fall ill.

– Go up to a child who, while undoubtedly brilliant, has never had the opportunity to attend a good school because of the geographic circumstances of her birth. Tell her that she cannot attend a good school because parents of other children paid more money than she ever could, and it would not be fair.

– Go up to a pregnant woman and tell her that, because of your personal religious beliefs, she cannot make a decision about her own reproductive health. Tell her that it does not matter how she came to be pregnant, because your beliefs say she cannot decide the course of her own life. Tell her that, between her life and the life of the multicellular blastocyst in her belly, you will always choose the barely-formed clump of cells because you personally believe that it is a child. Finally, if both she and the child manage to survive the birth, tell her that you will not allow any of your tax money to support her because it is not your responsibility, even though you forced her to go through all of it.

– Go up to an opposite-sex married couple and tell them that they should not be allowed to access or use contraception, because it violates your beliefs. When they get pregnant, be sure to blame it on them, because as a married couple they did not have to have sex.

If you can do that with no sense of shame or remorse, I am amazed you have read this far. You may think this is hyperbole, but to the people in need, your insistence that your personal religious beliefs trump all other rights, or your position that you owe nothing back to the country and society that has enabled your success, looks and sounds exactly like this. You do not live in the same America as I do.

You may not like it, but I don’t like anything that you believe. Then again, I would stand up for you if any of your actual rights were threatened. I would do that even knowing that you would not be there for me. That’s what family does, and that’s what America is to me.

Photo credit: “Flag” by linder6580 on stock.xchng.