New York, N.Y. — “Ask not what you can do for yourself or your country but what your country must do for you.”

That’s the creed of today, Clarence Thomas worries, in a country of people who were once well-positioned to receive John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.” At the time, ours was still a culture with “ears conditioned” to hear such calls to sacrifice and “hearts that did not resist it.”

It was a culture, Thomas said, that had an appreciation for “delayed gratification . . . something larger . . . perhaps something transcendent.” Children were raised with admonitions to “Learn to do without.” “Prepare for a rainy day.” And to know that “No one owes you anything.”

He aired his concerns for the future of the country he loves on Thursday night at a dinner on the upper East Side of Manhattan hosted by the Manhattan Institute. He spoke 17 years to the week after he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to the United States Supreme Court.

As if to remind us of how hard and unfair the road to the Court can be — a topic on which Thomas is an indisputable expert — Thomas cited Robert H. Bork, who should be on the Court, extensively.

Justice Clarence Thomas — who is his Grandfather’s Son, as he told us in his remarkable memoir last year — is a “son of the south” who “was raised by a man who clung” to a love of freedom and independence.

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One wonders what Barack Obama — who has criticized those who “cling” to religion and the Second Amendment and other liberties — would think of Thomas and his grandfather.

One wonders, especially, what Obama would think of Justice Thomas’s emphasis Thursday night on the critical necessity of originalism — the only standard that works for judges, Thomas says. “We are neither omniscient nor omnipotent. We are just judges. Like the Wizard of Oz, we are mere mortals.” Thomas said there are only two ways to approach being a judge. The first: “To try to see as best we can the framers’ intentions.” The second: “Make it up.” Thomas concluded: “At least originalism has the advantage of being legitimate and impartial.”

Yet in his debate with Senator John McCain on Wednesday night, also in New York, Obama said that he would look for those judges who have “an outstanding judicial record, who have the intellect, and who hopefully have a sense of what real-world folks are going through.”

Odds are, Obama’s response — just like his previous promise that he would nominate judges with empathy — didn’t set off alarm bells. As Thomas put it Thursday night, it is “astounding just how many of our fellow citizens feel strongly about our Constitutional rights but have no idea what the Constitution says.” It’s a shameful reality given, Thomas said, that the Constitution “is at least as easy to understand as a cell phone contract and it is vastly more important.”

And it’s an off-putting reality, given that the judiciary was intended to be the “least dangerous branch,” the one that simply interpreted the law, as “the framers structured our government that it be governed by the consent of the people.”

But the people don’t know that. The United States Constitution is “a tiny document that goes unread.” Americans’ ignorance of the Constitution “horrifies” Justice Thomas.

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At the end of every Court session, Justice Thomas reported, he takes his beloved clerks to Gettysburg. Especially after tough sessions, he wants them to be even more idealistic about liberty, the Constitution, and our country. In New York City, less than three weeks before Election Day, he recited words from Lincoln’s stirring address there:

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Thomas implored those gathered Thursday night — and by extension anyone and everyone who reads these words and their crucial reminder relayed here — to “rededicate yourselves to the promise of liberty.” And in a land where others have died for the privileges we enjoy, ask ourselves “what any of us has done to deserve to live as a free people in a free country.” Let us rededicate ourselves to ensure that “their bequest, this republic, will not perish from this earth. And definitely not on our watch.”

– Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online.