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In a nation founded on soaring ideals of individual liberty, freedom and happiness for all, steps taken last week have been a long time coming
The United States became a kinder nation in the past week.
The Supreme Court ruled that poor people have the right to receive government subsidies for healthcare insurance.
It said that gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry.
And five Southern states ended their public reverence for a slave-owning past. They started to remove the Confederate flag after a white man shot dead nine African-Americans in a bible study group in a South Carolina church. He had said he wanted to start a race war.
In a nation founded on soaring ideals of individual liberty, freedom and happiness for all, these three steps have been a long time coming. Each represents a rupture with a harsher past where if you were poor, gay or black, you were afforded fewer opportunities or protections to share in the country's promise.
As the United States begins to embrace more fully the modern values of tolerance, compassion and inclusion -- the same values that it so fulsomely advocates abroad -- I want to pause to honour those who paid too high a price in waiting for this day, and to consider the task ahead.
I remember Brandon Teena, a 21-year-old transgender man, his girlfriend and another friend who were shot to death in an isolated farmhouse in Humboldt, Nebraska, in 1993 after he reported a violent sexual assault. A baby was left crawling amongst the dead.
I remember Matthew Shepard, a university student, crucified on a deserted roadside near Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998. Two men he met at a bar pistol whipped him because he was gay, tied him to a fence and left him to die.
These were the well-publicised cases. Who remembers Britney Cosby, 24, and her lover, Crystal Jackson, murdered in Texas last year? Police say Britney's father bludgeoned them to death and threw their bodies into a dumpster because he was disgusted by their lesbian lifestyle?
Who remembers the deaths of countless, unarmed African-Americans at the hands of trigger-ready police before the uprisings over the last year in Ferguson, Missouri, in Cleveland and in Baltimore brought us the names of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Freddie Gray?
And then there is the silent killer, poverty, which takes far more lives from people whose names we will never know.
Rodney Todd, 36, and his seven children were among its victims. They died this April in their beds of carbon monoxide poisoning. Todd, who earned $10 a hour as a cafeteria worker, had rigged up a generator to heat their small home in rural Maryland after the power company disconnected the electricity.
They were among the 45 million Americans living below the poverty line, 14.5 percent of the population, equivalent to all the residents of South Africa, according to the U.S. Census. Too often their lives are shortened by bad housing, poor nutrition and no access to healthcare in the richest nation on earth.
The Supreme Court's decisions to help those left out and the actions of political leaders to remove the symbols of a racist past are the start in building a more compassionate world.
The toughest work lies ahead in addressing the daily acts that foster hate, exclusion, discrimination and violence.
But a nation that can mobilise the fundamental human instincts of love, empathy and respect for others is one that has a rich future. The United States has that capacity. It has begun the task.
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