Epic Quest progress report: Today is day 12. I broke my previous streak at Day 61, so had to start over. Total words so far: 1861.

It’s fashionable right now to dwell on the sins of our fathers.

It’s a well-deserved shift of focus, and probably overdue after two centuries of myth-making. But it’s easy to overdo it.

I was part of a conversation yesterday in which a high-school freshman started a comment with something like “The Founding Father I hate the most is…”

I have to admit I don’t even remember which Founding Father she named, or why she hates him most. I was so stricken by her choice of phrase the rest of the sentence didn’t even register with me, and the conversation soon moved on. I think I was the only one who found her words distracting, or maybe the only one who took them seriously, and I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours considering them. Maybe I wouldn’t have spent so much energy on them another time of the year, but this Independence Day it seems appropriate.

The Founding Father I hate the most. As if the Founding Fathers were a band of despicable criminals, as if they were more worthy of our revulsion than our reverence. As if the evil they did–and I don’t think any of them would deny they did evil–outweighs the good they did in laying the foundations of a great nation.

I don’t know where she got those words. A teacher, a peer, a web site. Maybe they sprang from her own mind. What I know is that few Americans would have said such a thing out loud thirty-odd years ago, when I was her age. It’s hard for me to accept this approach as better; I wonder if it’s not just our old mythology flipped on its ear, shifting focus from the Founders’ greatness to their failings without any effort to understand the bigger picture of their world, their times, the great experiment they committed their lives and ours to. The same stories, or at least overlapping stories, but with the Founders as ravening demons rather than larger-than-life demigods.

We certainly shouldn’t ignore their failings. Many of them spoke of all men being created equal while themselves owning slaves. Many of them named themselves We the People as they furthered a policy of relocation and genocide against the Peoples who were here before. Many of them held their wives and mothers in great esteem, but chose not to give them a voice in the new world they were creating. And none of them seems to have given more than a passing thought to those who loved differently, or who saw themselves as something other than the story their bodies told.

Serious failings by our standards, and nontrivial by their own. And in spite of them, they gave us the bones of a system that has grown to become today’s United States of America. We weren’t the first nation to call ourselves free, or to conceive of government by the consent of the governed, and we were far from the first to choose representatives to make policy on our behalf. But our Founders were the first to define a system of government by limiting their own power, and then they set the example for the rest of us by abiding by those limits and defining others as they went along. And they created, whether by unparalleled brilliance or blind luck, a system that has continually sought to make itself better by improving on the shortcomings of what came before.

It’s almost as if they knew they couldn’t have everything now, couldn’t even conceive of everything, so they focused on what they could build and left it to us to continue their work.

It’s almost as if they were so busy protecting what they had already built that they couldn’t allow themselves to reach for more.

It’s almost as if, far from being demigods or demons, they were imperfect humans working within the constraints of the world they knew even as they strained against those constraints.

I, for one, refuse to make demons of our Founding Fathers. On balance, I think it’s fair to say they did a great deal more good than evil.

I pray, one day, somebody says the same of me.