The Potential of America – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
I am certainly not an expert on the American Revolution, though I am a recipient of its fruits, my life one small result of its effects. The revolution echoed a time in our past when people of all classes in thirteen of the British colonies along the East Coast took up arms to defend what they saw as their inalienable rights against the forces of an overbearing imperial power. The union that came out of the revolutionary generation between those colonies, then independent states, and now federally united in one country is a testament to the marriage of idealism and realism in politics which proclaims that all of us can participate in our government, and moreover have a right and a duty to do so.
Our history has seen this country’s fortunes ebb and flow between prosperity and adversity. There are times when the United States has seen its great successes echo optimism and others when our internal divisions, sown from even before the Revolution, find division among us yet again. In the last twenty years we’ve seen ourselves into a deep abyss in which our factions and parties have driven us further apart from one another than we have seen in a good while. Bad news sells far better than good news. Many of our stories, both ancient and modern, have told of how fear is a quick and easy source of power and strength. Yet at the end that fear will only last for so long, and those who sought to use it will be left powerless and afraid.
I’m saddened this Fourth of July to look at our country and see just how forlorn our dreams have become amid the churning fury of all our rage. There are many victims in our country, victims whose lives over generations were torn apart by the greed, vice, and rage of others who sought power over them. I’m saddened to see how the symbols of all the hope and aspiration that this country represents are being used today by those who seek to exclude many of us from this country’s full bounty.
America truly is a country of near limitless possibility. We have so much potential as a country made up of an infinite diversity of people in infinite measures whose common roots only stretch back a few generations. Lin Manuel Miranda put it well in his musical Hamilton when he called this country a “great unfinished symphony” for there is so much about our culture that remains unwritten, in our future compared to other older societies. We certainly share a common heritage with those older societies, yet by our own geographic isolation and breadth we Americans have forged our own path divergent from that heritage.
I believe that so many of the problems we face today are born out of deep mistrust leading us to refuse to talk with one another, let alone listen to one another. Amid all the troubles of the present moment a bright future awaits us for my generation and Generation Z behind us are proving to be more active in our civic life, more willing to go out and vote, more concerned for the future than prior generations have as a whole seemed to be. There are proposals out there to reform society in order to fix many of the great problems that continue to plague us, reforms that probably could work, if only they were considered by those in power.So, on this Independence Day, I invite you to not only look to the past, to the Revolution and the Founding Fathers, but to look to the future as well, to all that we may yet accomplish in this young century.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 