We Americans are closer than we think
There have been many in my past, mostly the internal and personal kind. There has been great matters that encompass the world as well. They are the pieces of life that stay close to the psyche, that develop into beliefs and wishes, the kind that apply some framework for the soul to work with. Those things are the big gains, the big chances, and the big challenges. The times in life where change occurred, epiphanies happened, and larger events shook, and shaped how all of it fit together. In sensing the world today, engagement irrevocably changed, those deep changes, indeed the direction of many people’s futures, are squarely within those parameters. We are in no doubt at a definitive point in this experiment in democracy, this deluge of society’s ills and angsts. Yet through it all, those small bubbles that form before the rapid boiling begins are bound in the end to the same physics, the same ends. Ever a reminder that we are the water itself, and not the bubbles caused by the friction.
The reaches of this stretch deep into each and every one of us. There is likely not one thread that binds people to their beliefs, but an eclectic cord made up of threads and hairs, some twine, and a few larger ropes. The feeling that is predominant in recent weeks is something almost tangible, a touch of security to an insecure time. That although our divisions are at a heightened point as few others in our history, we are still bound by precepts that go beyond the pall of party, of race, or religion. I have seen it in the tone and temperament of the people I speak with, the folks who cherish each side of the political divide. I have heard it in the communications, and all the ways we do that communication, across the spectrum of society. There is something deeper within us, attached to that eclectic cord of beliefs is a singular strand that no matter where we stand in those beliefs, That binds us all, we are Americans. What that means to everyone is just like beliefs, a little different in everyone, but the results have always been clear.
As our diversities are highlighted and used against us, there is not panic, there is a resolve. In the very stories meant to divide us, are the stories that tell the other truths, the other reality… That we are also united. The different pieces of our construct are easily pushed by the weight of society, by injustice, and of misguided communications, of talk of subterfuge, and of unintended consequences. The various pieces, built of you and I, them and they, and he and she, are in their hearts American. In that basic position we cannot be pushed from. The message should be heard loudly that yes, we are still an imperfect union, But we’re still working on it. In that we will always be a broken, misguided, and stubborn, as much as we will be whole, willing, and educated to a better future. We have never been enemies, and our culture will not be weighed by its hate, but by its compassion.
That strand is eternal, it is as much a flame to draw us higher as much as an anchor to steady our flight. We are not the stuff of entertainment, of broad spectacles, and generalities, but of the individuals, and communities that are as diverse of mind as they are of color, of sex, of religions. We hold these truths to be self evident, this is by, in whole, the message that we share whether we are aware of it or not, whether we outwardly say it or not. We are Americans, we are all of the above, and we are all so much more. This place in history is wholly ours, what will be said of our time is still within our grasp to shape, what will be left of the past ours to derive. I have had them, the personal, and internal kinds, the changes that shape a lifetime, that give structure to a belief. That belief has never wavered, has never diminished, or stretched, we are Americans, and to that precept, we are irrevocably bound.
