Back in 1969, the country was divided about our seemingly endless intervention in another country’s civil war.
At a reading that year, the poet James Wright recalled the unsettled history of our own civil war and his origins along the Ohio River where the North and South meet. “I sometimes think,” he said, “that since that terrible war started, there’s been an awful, suicidal impulse in American life for us all to secede from one another. And I hope we can check that and realize that despair is very easily sunken into ... And we can’t live without one another. We just can’t do it.”
I believe Wright is absolutely right. We have been blessed with a dream handed on to us by the founders and cursed by a history of failures to live up to it. And we need one another as much as the dream.
At the Grammys in late January, Camila Cabello, a young, Cuban-born Mexican-American introduced Bono and U2, saying, with tears in her eyes: “Tonight in this room full of music’s dreamers, we remember that this country was built by dreamers for dreamers chasing the American dream.” By the time she was finished, well, I had tears in my eyes, too.
Friends and neighbors, it’s time for us all to live – and live up to – the dream and work together to build a country that loves justice more than money.
Jim Watt
Bayfield
