Ours is a nation of whirling colors and flashing fireworks.
Ours is a nation of whirling colors and flashing fireworks.
G rowing up in southeastern Massachusetts, I sometimes went to the beach with my parents. I would stand on the shore and feel as if I were perched on the edge of the world. The waves burst on the sand in front of me, and the heaving blue of the ocean reached out into the distance until it met the sky.
To stand there with the sand caking my feet helped drive home the sense of America as on the edge of possibility. While we strolled amid seagrass and shell fragments, the vastness awaited.
In our nation of multitudes, there are other flavors of vastness. The plains of Kansas stretch out in level infinity. The snow-crowned Rockies pierce the clouds. In upper Alaska, the sun reigns all night in midsummer, and the winter moon glistens on crystalline fields at noon.
But I grew up with the vastness of waves. I felt in my blood the daring of the people who crossed the ocean in wooden ships 400 years ago to see a new world — to lay a foundation for the novus ordo seclorum. Our country has always been filled with a kind of crazed daring. What else could have prompted Jefferson to pen the words “we hold these truths”?
That daring was required 250 years ago — not only to break free from England but also to build a new regime, to span a continent, to break the shackles of millions, to reach across the globe and beyond it to outer space, and to forge generation after generation of Americans. It was daring to conceive of a nation in liberty and to see liberty as more than license. American freedom is built on our commitments to others and our duties to a power that transcends our mortal comprehension.
The United States of America defies the sepia imperialism of ideology. Ours is a nation of whirling colors and flashing fireworks. It is not a wispy idea or a desiccated trail of genealogy. Perhaps Walt Whitman was right when he said that the United States was “essentially the greatest poem.” Poetry charges and complicates ideas with the heart’s blood. We are a people continually trying to understand ourselves amid the throbbing diversity of our lives, always seeking to rise to the challenge of the new.
Life and death meet on the shore. The gray specks of piping plovers race over the sand and dart around the husks of horseshoe crabs. Ours is a nation haunted by the specter of decline, too. After the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin fretted whether we could keep our republic. Our history has been dogged by accusations that our divides are too vast — that our nation is broken, decadent, and depleted. Angry voices call us to take the easy path of enmity while avoiding the hard work of imagining our union anew.
Despair comes easy, but think instead of the patriots in New York City when it was occupied by King George’s forces during the Revolutionary War. For years, they waited while their occupiers sang the hymns of a bloated king. They must have chased every scrap of news with simultaneous fear and hope, crushed by setbacks and electrified by American victories. In the flame-scarred city, they clung to the aspiration that at last they could be free.
Two hundred fifty years ago, 56 men dared to write a new republic into being. Now, we must shoulder the responsibilities of liberty — we who contain multitudes, standing before the roaring waves.