Don’t give up, America.
Don’t give up.
Keep trying.
Don’t let them tell you it isn’t worthwhile. Don’t let them rob you of the confidence to try by telling you it isn’t as pure or fine or noble or heroic as you thought. They haven’t gone through what you’ve gone through. They’re trying to make a name for themselves by denigrating yours. They’re revisionists, but their revisions don’t read as well. They just leave you with a vague sense of indecisiveness. They rob you of yours confidence. Don’t let them do it.
Don’t let them tell you the old stories aren’t true or the great stories aren’t great, that the method of transmission is more important than the message transmitted and that media is the message, that what matters is numbers not individuals and everyone has a right to be exactly who they want to be without reference to anyone else which is love without which there is nothing but isolation, chaos and conflict. Don’t let them tear apart the fabric of life for scraps and rags and call it a crazy quilt because they don’t know how to weave.
It’s a good country. It’s a fine nation. Mankind waited a long time to express itself in freedom and happiness and hope. Don’t let them convince you it isn’t, because they don’t know. They’ve taken the very rights and privileges they enjoy and fashioned weapons. They want something. They want you to give it to them. Don’t do it. Let them know it takes work and patience and has nothing to do with making a name for yourself. It has to do with making a nation for others you’ll never know, who will never know what you did to make the world a better place. I can give you a few examples.
The other night on television I watched a program where two items were evaluated and given estimated worth. One a mass produced toy car, the other a collection of hundreds of meticulously hand drawn botanical pictures in watercolor of every variety of wildflower in the state where the artist lived, a quiet, unassuming woman who died a hundred years before and whose work remained hidden and kept in a trunk in a room in a house until now.
The toy they said would bring one hundred fifty thousand dollars or more. The pictures were worth a few thousand, so few I could buy them if I wanted if only to rescue them from oblivion.
Don’t give up, America.
Don’t ever give up.
There’s Rhapsody in Blue and hot dogs and relish and mustard and ketchup on a hot day with beer or a soft drink and there are so many beers or soft drinks to choose from you could spend an hour trying to make up your mind. There’s cars and trucks and motorcycles and mopeds and bicycles and wagons and flights of planes and gliders and snowmobiles and skateboards and roller skates and bowling balls and baseballs and softballs and footballs and soccer balls and tennis balls and golf balls and billiard balls and basketballs and all that for fun if you want to have fun and even if you don’t its fun to watch.
Don’t give up, America.
Don’t ever give up.
We’re just getting started. There are nations and peoples so old they have lived twice as long as we have existed in the first quarter of their history and wouldn’t it look funny if the land of the free and the home of the brave winked out after a few setbacks and a few disappointments and didn’t know what to do with its own success? Wouldn’t that be funny? Wouldn’t that be a joke on the whole human race the people who came over on boats with all their possessions in a trunk the size of a foot locker and risked their lives to breath a few gulps of free air after burying one of their children at sea and pulling an abscessed tooth in the between decks with a pair of rusty pliers and vomiting their last meal of salt pork and a biscuit over the side in a storm?
Who cares if the beautiful girl from Holland felt a slight fever around her cheeks when she left the boat in New York Harbor and never lived long enough to bear her first child or meet the man who would father it or the GI from New Jersey who tired to make it ashore on June 6, 1944 in Normandy, but caught one of the 8,768 rounds expended by the crew of a German machine gun overlooking Utah beach before they died in a flame from the Bangalore torpedo pushed into their pillbox by a master sergeant who wanted to die anyway because his girl told him in a letter he received staging from the London docks for the invasion she’d met a Marine sent home with shrapnel she loved better with a Silver Star to prove it? Who cares what they did? You can see anything you want on the Internet. You can read anything you want in the library. You can be anything you want online and pretend your way into another world with drugs. If you’re doctor won’t prescribe them you can get them somewhere else. It’s all about now. The Greatest Generation didn’t have a clue. They gave their lives for nothing, because all they gave their lives to do or save for others had been so altered and violated and re-arranged they wouldn’t recognize it if they came back and quite frankly they wouldn’t if they had the chance because they knew concepts like honor and loyalty and patience and those things don’t matter any more. It’s got a bar code if it’s important and if it isn’t important who cares?
“Now you try it,” said Sergeant Thrasher as he threw the M-1 carbine back into my face, all 9.5 pounds of it unloaded, “but let me tell you something. They can talk all they want about tactics and strategy, but when that first shot goes off its every man for himself. Remember that and remember your buddy. You might both come home. Otherwise this musical instrument is your best friend. Love it, respect it, honor it, cherish it, call it your Mother, but do not ever call it a gun in my presence again. Do and I’ll ram it down your throat.”
“Yes sir.”
The next day we saw the Marine Corp Silent Drill Team and I got an idea of what he meant. I never went to war. I never killed anyone. I never believed what they told me. How could they be the Greatest Generation if that’s what they believed? They dropped the Bomb. They dropped it twice. They world got smaller after that. Trouble is it never got any better, just smaller and that’s what they call critical mass. I wonder what’s going to happen if we do what uranium does, if we just explode because we can’t take it anymore?
Don’t give up, America.
Don’t ever give up.
Remember what it felt like for Thomas Alva Edison to throw the switch and see the filament keep burning. Remember what it felt like for Alexander Graham Bell to shout into the next room, “Mister Watson, come here, I need you,” and have Watson come in astonished and say, “I heard you,” and mean through a wire. Remember what it felt like for Orville to look up and see Wilbur sailing away under power and Wilbur to look down and see Orville waving his cap. Remember what it meant for Andrew Carnegie, the richest man in the world, to give away all his money before he died. Remember the tight smile across the lips of Henry Ford when he mounted an internal combustion engine on a frame with four wheels, a steering gear and a box of gears and it ran and he realized how he could make more, more than anyone but he could imagine. Remember Eli Whitney and Henry Fulton and William Tecumseh Sherman and Paul Revere and Alvin York and the Unknown Soldier. Remember all the names in all the cemeteries or all the names in one cemetery or just one of the names, your own name as it will appear someday in the list of those born and those who died in the United States of America and don’t give up.
Don’t give up, America.
Don’t ever give up.
The sun is almost up. Light appears in the sky. A new day has begun. Some have never slept, up all night watching the stars and signs in the heavens, lovers, homeless, scientists, cowboys and sentries never closed their eyes, believers in the vigilance it takes to be aware and prepared lest someone use darkness as a cover for chicanery, but they are free to close their eyes now, for we are awake. The world is ready to greet us and we are ready to greet the world. Coffee and a hot shower and all is well. The silence foretells great stories and wonderful thoughts, the amazement of the mind free to roam without restraint or other people’s expectations.
What will freedom mean today? What will God ordain which is impossible for us to ignore or avoid? We are destined it seems for greatness in what we do and what we fail to accomplish, out in the open, obviously superior or inadequate, self-conscious and stumbling over our lines just the best damn show in town. We’ve done it all and this new day will see us do it more, this new day is ours. Shall we run and play? Shall we hide and seek? Shall we roll up our sleeves and let out a shout? Shall we sweat in the sun or go roll in the snow? You tell me, but be quick. I’m on my way. It’s a new day. I’m in it. I lived to see it. I’m ready for it. I feel great. Daylight in the swamp.
Don’t give up, America.
Don’t ever give up.
Where did you come from?
You came from the soul of dissatisfaction. No one who ever dreamed about you believed life could not be better. No one who dreamed about you ever woke up crying, “No, no, no.” They wake up crying, “Yes” and did not want the dream to end, but never wanted sleep again if they could awaken to the dream come true. They wanted what they wanted in their deepest souls and whether they believed in God or not, they wanted to invent God and call it by a name and that name became America. The only true atheists are the ones who do not believe, not in God, but in America, because belief in God takes faith. Look around. The evidence of God is everywhere. Trees and grass and rocks and sky and birds and earth and water and fish and animals of all description, let alone the plants and animals of their kind. That’s all evidence of God. People who don’t believe in God are just being obstinate. They don’t matter, but people who don’t believe in America need persuasion. Look around again. Look at the crime and poverty. Look at the corruption and pollution and ignorance and slavery to whatever fashion is going around. Look at the needs and the wants and the desires and the wrecked equipment and the derelict buildings and tell me you don’t believe in America. If you do, I know you don’t believe in fixing anything or inventing anything or working to make anything happen for the good and I know you to be the only true definition of an atheist. Then again I will ignore you, but not with the whimsical sympathy I feel for those who say there is no God, but with the hatred and abiding contempt I feel for a sluggard, a slouch, a naysayer and a traitor, because you take all you can take from whatever is left and you don’t intend to put anything back for anyone else or improve anything for people yet to come. You intend to use it all for yourself and make everything serve your own expectations and appetites and that makes you not only un-American, but a lousy human being. I say to hell with you, because even in hell you might re-arrange the furniture, but you just sit and complain.
Don’t give up, America.
Don’t ever give up.
Remember the pain. Remember all the pain it took to be who you are and don’t let it be for nothing. Remember all the bloody births and agonizing deaths, the millions who have lived and died for something as noble as another human being’s wellbeing or just their own venal comforts. Every saint that ever knelt in a church or lit a candle for peace and love and every trollop who ever sat at a bar grinding out a cigarette and asking for another drink for the same peace and love have contributed to what you have today for being an American. Every laborer and every deadbeat, every mother and every whore, every father and every playboy who never had any intention of marrying the girl anyway, they’ve all been there before you and paved the way, the assembly line worker who spent twenty-five years on the line and paid for it with two bad knees, a bad back and feet that hurt so much he can’t wear leather shoes, that guy who raised a son who ended up in jail for petty larceny and a preference for little girls, all the teachers who retired after faultless careers before countless students over decades and the poor shmuck who can’t hold a job because his preference is for gin or her preference is for cocaine, all of them are waiting in the grave to see what you will do with the outright gift of freedom and excess you have been given and if you can’t make anything happen with a landscape littered by all the merchandise and resources of a century without warfare ravaging our land, then you can’t make it out of anything. They would lead you to believe it’s over, the only thing you have to do is stay out of trouble and enjoy your life, but they’re wrong. They’re lying. They’re telling you what they want to tell you and what they think you want to hear. but they’re telling you a lie. Have you come to realize yet the biggest stories aren’t sports and politics? The biggest stories are out there in the hearts and minds of people just like you and if you don’t write that story with the blood of your life for ink and the paper of your soul it won’t get written. No one will know and the media will win, the great middle ground that never made anything happen, just hangs around to see what other people will say, but if all the people just wait for what is being said then don’t you see it’s over. It found the hole it fell into and pulled it in after itself. It’s all over, but not if you don’t wasn’t it to be. Ask God what He wants and listen. He’ll tell you. It’s not over yet.
Don’t give up, America.
Don’t ever give up.
It doesn’t have to end this way. The murder and the mayhem, the endless lines of cars, the parking lots that cover entire states and counties and principalities, the ground covered by concrete and millions of miles of wire that cordon and fence and restrict and the acres, even hundreds and thousands of square miles of signage that direct and prohibit and warn and instruct and caution and restrict and declare, someday all of them will be gone and the question remains, “Who are you amid the signs?” What role do you have to play amid the lives other people are living, people you don’t know, people who have just as much right to live their way as you and won’t take you or no for an answer? That’s the challenge. That’s the future, for in the midst of a wilderness no longer composed of trees and desert and unfenced boundless horizons, but a wilderness now of people, you must find a way to explore and adopt and acquire and achieve among all of them and let them know you are who you are without assaulting them, at least more than you can handle in managing them in your own style to your own purposes as a compliment to your own ambition. It’s about the people now and how you relate to them, not any more how you relate to the bold, gross elements or wild aspirations of nature which could care less whether you live or die.
Don’t ever give up, America.
Don’t ever give up.
Try again.
It has to be about something greater than the money. It has to be something greater than the millions of abortions and hundreds of thousands of deaths upon the highways. It has to be about something greater than the murders and sexual abuse and drug addiction and mindless hours spent in front of tubes and screens that glow and remain dark. It has to be about something more, something greater than the churches gone empty and the scheduled worship and the doors that are locked until just before and locked again just after the people come and go to be socially acceptable and feel good about themselves while the house around them burns. It has to be about something more than fear and contempt for others who have less and gates and bars and closed circuit television for those who have and want to keep it and for those who have been arrested and incarcerated for trying to steal it. It has to be about something more. It has to be about something more than shopping malls and derelict small towns and now the shopping malls go empty because people don’t want to leave their homes. It has to be ab0ut something more than schools where children are slaughtered in class by automatic weapons in the hands of maniacs while armed guards stand outside doing nothing but contemplate their pensions as law enforcement officers and call for backup. It has to be about something as grand and wondrous as the sight of land after a voyage of months on the open sea in an open boat or under sail and the last barrel of food or water open and rotting in the hold. It has to be about something as great as the wagon wheels that left ruts in the sold stone of impossible ravines and blank deserts on the way to what they hoped would be a better life if only they could make it through the molten days and freezing nights. It has to be about something more than what we have. It has to be about where we are going. It has to be about glory and the discovery of the world we left behind to begin the new one now not new anymore, but new enough to provide us with all the materials we need to make the world at large a new world. We can do it. We must do it. We are destined to do it. We know how. We only need courage and God. We are all together ready and He is ready always. We need to do it.
We need to try again.
We can do it, America.
We can win.
♥