My country, right or wrong
a brief note about the Election
My country, right or wrong: if right, to be kept right, if wrong, to be set right.
That is the mantra I’ve been repeating to myself, and to friends and colleagues in the wake of the Election. As more information comes in regarding what happened, the whys and hows of it, I invite you to think on that mantra too.
I’ve also been thinking about duty these past few days: duty to country, to community, to family. For me, duty is a function of love. I love my family, my community, and my country, so I feel a profound sense of responsibility and duty to all these things. It is an obligation to act that I fully embrace. In the face of despair and disappointment, these feelings are what inspire me to shake it off and get back up, to roll up my sleeves and ask myself: “How can I help? What can I do for my family, my community, my country?”
In my view, What can I do? should always be taken as a real question instead of an expression of despair.
For now, the answer is reach out to everyone I know and check in. But next week it will mean signing up to volunteer in local civic engagement and outreach, leveraging my network to look at larger initiatives I can play a role in, examining my own businesses and slate of projects to find the impactful angles, bringing together all of the wonderful people I know and asking: “How can we work together and contribute to the solution, even as we work to diagnose the problem?”
I’ve been re-reading the poems of Walt Whitman (one of the greatest vessels of the American spirit to ever put pen to paper), and found this:
“Courage! My brother or my sister!
Keep on! Liberty is to be subserved, whatever occurs;
That is nothing that is quelled by one or two failures, or any number of failures,
Or by the indifference or ingratitude of the people, or by any unfaithfulness…
But, for all this, Liberty has not gone out of the place, nor the infidel entered into possession.
When Liberty goes out of a place, it is not the first to go, nor the second or third to go,
It waits for all the rest to go—it is the last.
When there are no more memories of heroes and martyrs,
And when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth,
Then only shall Liberty be discharged from that part of the earth…”
It really is something to hear the voice of a fellow patriot reach out through the ages and speak clearly and poignantly the feelings in my own heart.
What a privilege to understand how far we’ve come. What an enormous challenge, how far we have yet to go. What an opportunity, to roll up our sleeves and do our part, to make our own small contributions to history, to stare down despair and apathy, to summon up our courage and conviction, to speak our values boldly, and to live by those values.
There is more to come, there always will be. Whatever comes, we must meet it, boldly and with courage. That is our collective duty, to ourselves and to each other, to our nation and to the world.