I'm not taking a Fourth of July holiday break so stop hoping for that. What I am doing in the spirit of the holiday is sharing something I wrote not long ago and not just because my last original idea died of loneliness. I called it:
America Is a Dream the Whole World Owns
There are a lot of traditional activities for Independence Day, not that reading these words is in any danger of becoming part of that, and if you've heard me write some of this before, you've been standing too close to the keyboard.
Before it gets really crazy busy over the next few days with holiday preparations perhaps each of us should look in the mirror and then take a look around at the country we received from our parents and their parents and which we hope to give to our children and theirs.
There’s been as much gained as there has been lost through the tears and years and some of what has changed has been better and some of it has only been different. The dilemma is in deciding which and what.
By many accounts the heat was oppressive and tempers were hot in Philadelphia two hundred and forty-eight years ago as malcontents and troublemakers (in the eyes of His Majesty, George III, King of England) gathered to refine, define, and catalog their grievances and complaints with the most powerful empire the world had ever seen.
Articulating what they called our ‘unalienable rights’ to include ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ the founders of our republic, who did not agree on very much except that the present state of affairs such as they were in 1776 could not continue, concluded the only way forward as a people on this largely unexplored, new continent whose size and wealth was not yet known, was to break with the past and declare independence from King and Crown.
And out of all of that has come all of this.
And along the way, the original magic and meaning have been muffled by backyard pool parties, holiday car sales, and chicken fried steaks on the barbecue.
Our politics is spirited even if our interest isn't; we confuse partisan and patriot far too frequently and our understanding of issues is muddled and muddied because too many of us have created media echo chambers where all we ever hear/see and read is what we choose, not what we should.
And, again, it’s not that we all agree with who we are and what we are doing. It’s been reported we haven’t been this divided morally, politically, and socially as a country since the Civil War. And that should frighten us more than it does and galvanize us into redoubling our efforts to reach out to one another, and yet we continue to shrug our shoulders.
Some say never have so many had so much of life’s material rewards but others contend that never have so many struggled to hold on to what they have. There's a lot to be said on both sides of that argument and there’s even more that we're not hearing because we’re just not very good anymore at listening to one another.
What may be missing in our nation is our sense of self, our confidence and belief in our own abilities to forever adopt, adapt and overcome. We had those traits at our Founding and I would hope each, in our own way, might again rediscover them, both for those whose inheritance we are and for those whose promise is yet to be.
-bill kenny
No comments:
Post a Comment