In these fraught times, one side is promising something wonderful about the future and the other, something horrible. Or one is blaming one side for something in the past and and the other taking credit for it, and in turn, finding something new to blame the first for. One side magnifies past sins of the other, while the other heaps blame upon the first. Both make grandiose promises about the future.
We need to stop for a moment and call out something uplifting from the present that we all can share, especially this semiquincentennial weekend (who came up with that!) Let me suggest:
Oh beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain.
For purple mountains' majesties above the fruited plains.
America, America, God shed his grace on thee
and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.
Words by Katherine Lee Bates in 1895 and set to the music Materna, composed by Samuel A. Ward in 1892.
America the Beautiful says it all to me, plus I can sing it. And it isn't rooted in conflict, in the blood of Fort McHenry or any other conflict. No having to extol courage under fire. We've had enough of bombs bursting in air.
Of course there are many who have doubts about that brotherhood stuff; I can think of a couple whose initials are SM and JDV. And invariably, they consider themselves good Christians or good Buddhists or good Hindus or good Muslims or good whatevers, despite their creeds endorsing universal brotherhood. They are steeped in suspicion of the other, in dislikes of strange names or odd (to them) hats or foods or ways of managing their affairs. (We're suspicious of their foods until one of them opens a hot restaurant in town. And then we face the charge of cultural appropriation if we try to emulate it by hiring some of them. I thought that was the idea: to borrow the best and create jobs.)
Well, I've wandered a way from something many of us could agree on here in the present. America has beauty inherent in her. Let's work together to make it manifest again.
