The Khans reminded me why I love America: Column

I would say I honor our Constitution.

But there’s something pro forma about that when your family has been here since 1648, and you had relatives at the battles of Lexington and Concord. Oh, yeah. Nice Constitution. Yawn.

I came to feel more deeply about the Constitution as a Southern civil rights worker. We had no real protection, but the federal government’s authority over interstate commerce gave it some power over the state. (We didn’t know that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was busy trying to blackmail Martin Luther King.)

Opposing the war (Vietnam), before that became fashionable, I came to value the First Amendment, and the Fourteenth. Representing clients in pro bono free-speech legal cases strengthened my respect for our Constitution.

But how to love the thing, Khizr Khan taught me that. I urge you to listen to the All Things Considered interview with him on NPR.

Khan came from a place with no such document. He knows how marvelous our constitutional freedoms are. He carries a pocket copy, and keeps others at home to give away.

As a child, I visited the Statue of Liberty.

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

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That sounded pretty neat. I did not then know that on my father’s side, relatives of mine had been among those masses crowding into lines at Ellis Island or its predecessor, desperate to live in the United States. I just felt proud that we were so kind, so fair.

Khizr Khan reawakens in me that wonder, that love of what is good in our country. His reverence for the Constitution, his teary eyes reading the Fourteenth Amendment. Sure, it ain’t just the document, it’s a whole tradition; but the document matters.

It’s hardly worth noting the contrast with Donald Trump, who reportedly promised to defend Article XII of the Constitution, though there are only seven articles. I doubt he’s read the document, unless he was forced to do so in military school. How he has convinced so many good people who love the Constitution to support him is a sad mystery.

But I feel cheap saying that. I’d rather just express respect for the Khans — father and son and, yes, mother, who capably edited the father’s speech as they prepared to appear at the Democratic National Convention.

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Khan is a humble man whose unpretentious eloquence humbles me. His son was a true hero, who intentionally walked toward a known danger to spare many other lives by giving up his own.

Asked to relate something about his son that we don’t know, Khan recounted an incident at the University of Virginia. Humayun kept seeing a basketball court with a black group playing at one end and a white group playing at the other. They never played together. That bothered him. He tried to play with each. Then he organized a game in which one captain from each group picked teams, but each had to have an equal number from each group on his team. They played, and began talking as well. Cool!

But the moment tears welled up in my eyes was when I heard that after Humayun’s death, some of those players visited his parents, told them this story, and said it had changed their lives.

Whatever your politics, and whether or not you approve of the war, no one can deny that Humayun had a special grace. Grace and courage. Listening to this interview, I know where he got that grace.

This is a family we can learn from.

Peter Goodman writes, shoots pictures, and sometimes practices law. This column first appeared in the El Paso Times.