My New Year's Resolution: Recovering the American Promise

 

Many of us grew up in an America steeped in the American Promise. Yes, we were racially discriminatory and gender biased. Yes, we excluded the original Americans who greeted and suffered at the hands of the new arrivals from Europe. Yes, we promoted our America through self-serving and excluding many from the promise. Over the centuries, the American Promise has been battered and torn, but it still exists on the horizon of history as an unfilled promise. The promise has inspired people to work together and improve their lives and those around them. It encouraged people to learn and grow. It encouraged a sense of community and fostered a kinship with folks across the USA. Despite our misusing it, the American Promise was real and had real, positive consequences in our lives.

 

But the American Promise is no longer a widely shared belief. Many have become enamored of a dystopian future rather than the utopian promise of a better future. We prefer cynicism to idealism, claiming the former is more realistic and reasonable. We gather with our tribe in an echo chamber of ideas and aspirations. We struggle to imagine a viable national life. Our tribe may be a political party, an age cohort, a particular faith, or people who share our particular brand of dystopian cynicism. However, the net result is that we are no longer a country centered around an unrealized but powerful American Promise. We have chosen to separate ourselves from our neighbors and pursue our self-interest at the expense of those different from us.

 

In many ways, we live in an America that is in exile from our homeland. We have given up on the American Experiment infused into our national DNA by the women and men of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. We have yielded to the baser instincts that nearly ripped our new country apart during the civil warfare of the mid-19^th Century. We have lost sight of the sacrifices of millions of our grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents. We have lost sight that the vast majority of us are the children of immigrants and, instead, have turned our backs on the millions of more recent immigrants who have come to these shores for a better life.

 

We have replaced hope with greed as our defining character. We have replaced honest labor as our primary occupation with a preoccupation with games that rank us by our social status and bank accounts. We have turned our backs on a better future to feed the wants and desires of the present. We are living in exile in our own homeland. We are stealing the promise from our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren.

 

In this blog, I will strive to give voice to the American Promise and offer ideas about how we might recover a living hope for our society and people. I encourage you to consider how you see the American Promise and discover ways to survive the exile. As always, respectful comments and honest disagreement are welcome and encouraged. Engagement and discussion are also encouraged. It took many generations to build the as-yet-unfulfilled American Promise. It is time for our generations (Boomer, GenX, Millennial, and GenZ) to renovate, enhance, and share the promise of the American Experiment. 

 

I suspect it will be a global rather than continental vision. It will likely be grounded in pragmatic rationalism rather than romantic idealism. It will require those under 50 and those over 50. It will likely be multicultural and less focused on any single group. And it will take a generation or two for it to become widely held and accepted. In the meantime, I do not expect easy times or calm discussions. There will be very few Boomers who will see it through. Those 20 and younger will reap the bounty of this new. For the rest of us, we will have to withstand the whirlwind of change and chaos of the in-between time.

 

However, each of us who live in exile has a role in leading us back to the future of the American Promise. I will share some of my ideas in the coming months, and I encourage you to do the same. Together, we can get the conversation going and plant the seeds that will inspire future generations to tend and nurture until the tree begins to bear real fruit. This exile will end, but in the meantime, let us begin the conversations about what the future will hold.

 

Happy New Year!

 

Bob Dees