Alone in the Wilderness:
Truth and Identity in the World We Made
Long before the railroads and wagon trains and the epic migrations that consummated the birth of the American empire; before the wars of territorial opportunism that wrested California and the Southwest from Mexico, before Manifest Destiny, before the Louisiana Purchase and Lewis and Clark, before there was an American nation at all- the New World was crossed by European explorers, members of the clergy, and entrepreneurs looking at once for different and for similar goals- the mythic Northwest Passage, souls to save in the name of Christian enlightenment, pelts to feed the rather hyperbolic fashion sense of the Old World. The paths they trod with their native allies, and the mountains, rivers, lakes, and forests they encountered along the way- always in mortal peril and always stalked by the threat of violence and privation- were unknown to white men. That an entire continent lay between them and the vague promises of the way to the Orient that drove the imaginations of their sponsors was of no matter to them- they lived in an age of discovery, in a time when distance and the elemental fear of the unknown was as much of a justification for risk as it was a source of trepidation. Some would be overcome by the elements, others would be lost in the unmapped interior of a land no one knew. Still others would fall prey to the rising tensions between Europeans and Native Americans. In time, their wanderings would both illuminate in myth and lore the undiscovered paths they walked, and set the stage for war between colonial England and France, and for much more.
We know some of their names, which now adorn mountain ranges and waterways and historical accounts that have been widely circulated in school curricula and academic studies concerned with the geographic and political evolution of the European transformation of the Americas. Others we know little of, yet their exploits are no less worthy of our interest and consideration. One of the most successful and persistent of these was the Frenchman Pierre-Esprit Radisson, who, along with the second husband of his half-sister, Medard Chouart Des Groseilliers, made four extended journeys during the 1650s out of French Canada through the St. Lawrence River valley, the Great Lakes region, and out as far as the northern reaches of the Mississippi and the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in the employ of the fur trade and in answer to his own illimitable curiosity, surviving capture and torture by the Iroquois, trials of exposure and famine, and every latent danger that waits for all strangers in a strange land. In his later years, after trading his allegiance to the Canadian French for the sanction of the English, Radisson penned accounts of his journeys in English- though his command of the language could hardly be construed as fluent.
The passages below are from a compendium of explorer’s journals published in 1904 (Pathfinders of the West: Being the Thrilling Story of the Adventures of the Men Who Discovered the Great Northwest: Radisson, de La Vérendrye, Lewis and Clark) by Agnes C. Laut, who introduced Radisson’s own unintentionally lyrical musings on the contradictions between the Old World and the New by acknowledging her subject’s idiosyncratic orthography before continuing with her own speculations on the significance of the dawning of an era that changed the course of history:
[Laut] “Here is what he says, in that curious medley of idioms which so often results when a speaker knows many languages but is master of none:-
[Radisson] ‘The country was so pleasant, so beautiful, and so fruitful, that it grieved me to see that the world could not discover such inticing countries to live in. This, I say, because the Europeans fight for a rock in the sea against one another, or for a steril land…where the people by changement of air engender sickness and die.…Contrariwise, these kingdoms are so delicious and under so temperate a climate, plentiful of all things, and the earth brings forth its fruit twice a year, that the people live long and lusty and wise in their way. What a conquest would this be, at little or no cost? What pleasure should people have…instead of misery and poverty!’
[Laut] From Lake Nipissing they passed to Lake Huron, where the fleet divided. Radisson and Groseillers went with the Indians, who crossed Lake Huron for Green Bay on Lake Michigan. The birch canoes could not venture across the lake in storms; so the boats rounded southward, keeping along the shore of Georgian Bay. Cedar forests clustered down the sandy reaches of the lake. Rivers dark as cathedral aisles rolled their brown tides through the woods to the blue waters of Lake Huron….The Indians waited the chance of a fair day, and paddled over to the straits at the entrance to Lake Michigan….All struck south for Green Bay. So far Radisson and Groseillers had traveled over beaten ground. Now they were at the gateway of the Great Beyond, where no white man had yet gone.
Before the opening of spring, 1659, Radisson and Groseillers had been guided across what is now Wisconsin to ‘a mighty river, great, rushing, profound, and comparable to the St. Lawrence.’ On the shores of the river they found a vast nation- ‘the people of the fire,’ prairie tribes, a branch of the Sioux, who received them well. This river was undoubtedly the Upper Mississippi, now for the first time seen by white men. Radisson and Groseillers had discovered the Great Northwest. They were standing on the threshold of the Great Beyond. They saw before them not the Sea of China, as speculators had dreamed, not kingdoms for conquest, which the princes of Europe coveted; not a short road to Asia, of which savants had spun a cobweb of theories. They saw what every Westerner sees today,- illimitable reaches of prairie and ravine, forested hills sloping to mighty rivers, and open meadow-lands watered by streams looped like a ribbon. They saw a land waiting for its people, wealth waiting for possessors, an empire waiting for the nation builders.”
In 1904 the impact of the opening of the New World by European man could still be sensed; the closing of the American frontier had been declared only a short time before. In her narrative, Laut sounded the familiar themes of European-American expansion- a vast, rich land waiting to be used and possessed, full of riches and the promise of the glory of empire. We were still moving west then, still carving states out of the wilderness, still looking for a future that always seemed to beckon just beyond our grasp. Did we ever reach it? In a certain sense we did, for we took everything that was there, and more, and built a nation and an identity out of it. No one would say that the American experiment failed. Yet was there not something that was lost along the way?
Perhaps the most tragic eventuality of our national experience is that Radisson’s dreamscape of earthly bounty and beatitude is largely lost forever, consigned to a past that was never an apt prologue for the future in which we now live. His was a time of great ambition, and of the uncovering of great truths, in spite of the preconceived notions that shuttered European man’s capacity for dispelling the unrealistic visions of the New World that so colored the shared perceptions of the day. Over the intervening centuries between then and now, unimaginable progress fostered by the wealth of the Americas has transformed our lives. What no one could have anticipated was that we would lose our ability to discern truth.
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
In our own time, this charming aphorism has been, according to a number of reliable sources, attributed to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, whose wit and independent spirit served him well in a variegated and honorable career in public service that spanned several decades. Yet, by his own admission, the words were not his- he had adapted his version of the saying from a remark he recorded by Alan Greenspan, who, in describing the composition of a particular commission he had chaired, had put it thus: “Each member was entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.” Greenspan had perhaps first read or heard it as “Each of us is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts,” recorded as a part of testimony given before the Congress in 1973 by James R. Schlesinger, secretary of defense for the Nixon and Ford administrations. Schlesinger in turn may have borrowed the phrase from Bernard M. Baruch- “Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.” In the end, it does not matter. What does matter is that we have gone farther than is both prudent and excusable in divorcing our responsibility to personal and official integrity from our ability to distinguish opinion from fact; supposition from truth. We have done so in the interest of creating a more perfect politics, not a more perfect union. Our contemporary politics are the product of a fifty-year process of separating truth from public discourse. As at all such times, Populism is the unhappy offspring of the dilution of our faith in immutable, objective truths. Populism was never meant to be the vehicle for that process, yet so it has come to be. Populism as we know it now- very nearly as the language of a dictatorship of narcissism- threatens to discredit and dismember our society as we have known it. And yet- is not our democracy itself partially at fault?
According to some contemporary essayists and thinkers, the moral and philosophical gloss that has characterized our apprehension of democratic rule has been eroded away by its own inability to provide impatient nations with immediate, unambiguous solutions to issues and problems that appear to limit their aspirations. Populists, and their eventual successors- authoritarians, offer instant gratification by promising arbitrary change and unilateral decision-making. They set themselves up as the antithesis of democratic governance, which appears to the frustrated as capable only of postponing solutions, rather than facing them head-on. Negotiation, compromise, and patience represent dissembling, and a lack of political and ideological courage. Even when populists fail- as they, more often than not, do- they merely shift their narrative and promise anything- even the opposite- of their initial position, and do so with all of the dramatic flair, urgency, and vehemence they can muster. It is an effective practice. Leaders are never more leader-like when they purport to solve all things to all people.
As with democratic government, so, too, for the manner by which we have been shaping the contours of district-specific, state, and national electoral demographics, for our faith in the rule of law, for rights and freedoms won only at the cost of suffering and death. In unwittingly committing the business of the nation to a transactional or to a commodified public policy that determines the manner of our discourse, governance, diplomacy, and national and personal identity, we have given away much that we fought for time and again on the battlefields of every century of our existence- in the courts, in the streets of our towns and cities, and in our collective conscience. The parts that remain do not equal the whole- the promise of a greater nation for everyone- that we have wantonly squandered in our rush to embrace populist charlatans and self-proclaimed saviors.
It remains to be seen if we can ever repair the damage we have willingly done to the covenant that binds us as individuals to others, and to our nation. And, in doing so, we have populated our political leadership with an aristocracy of sycophants which exerts itself only in the interest of its own self-preservation. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a sycophant as “A person who acts obsequiously towards someone important in order to gain advantage.” It lists as synonyms terms such as these: “toady, creep, crawler, fawner, flatterer, flunkey, truckler, groveller, doormat, lickspittle, kowtower, obsequious person, minion, hanger-on, leech, puppet, spaniel.” It is certain that the Founders were familiar with both the term and the type. It is also certain that they designed our political system with an eye toward limiting the penetration and influence of such vermin into the mechanisms of our public institutions, that they believed our leaders should be people of integrity capable of placing the welfare of the republic above their own. It is unfortunate that their hopes were consigned to the same fate as that of the truth.
National introspection is nothing if not a complicated process, but it has become clear that we are no longer as we believe ourselves to be. Any adventure of self-examination must first and foremost be a search for truth. Yet the same series of events that culminated in our independence did not engender unity and, therefore, a single source of truth for the American identity. The divisions between North and South, Federalist and republican, and what we now recognize as conservative and liberal were obvious even as the Constitution was being written. In the interest of forging a confederation of states, the noble truths espoused in the Declaration of Independence were repudiated in favor of concessions to the moral contradictions of slavery, establishing a precedent that led to the Three-Fifths Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Law, Jim Crow, the disenfranchisement of women, the legal persecution of immigrants, and the centuries-long lawful sanction of the geographic, legal, intellectual, and moral disunity of a nation that had been established as a haven for the diversity and natural rights of mankind. The contravening ideologies of the present time are no different from those of 250 years ago. If, then, ideology became the first product of our nationhood, then truth was the first casualty of the ideological divisions of our nationhood. The truth is now conditional, personal, and malleable, and our nation suffers for it. It is no longer sufficient to excuse our faithlessness toward the truth by restating the founding ideals of the Framers, for to do so too often substitutes exemptions for our own transgressions for what should be our admissions of guilt. The political and intellectual separation of preordained self-realization from monarchist coercion that culminated in the American Revolution seems a far cry from our current definitions of the American way. If a valid American idealism still survives in the modern era, it does so on the knife’s edge of our ability to either rededicate ourselves to the pursuit of unity or our apparent preference to descend into a permanent state of disunity. The truth is not an artifact of competitive advantage. If we truly cannot bear that anyone would surpass us or even to affect the appearance of surpassing us- as individuals or as a nation- the way forward will be darkened and tortuous. We certainly did not begin this way:
“The Dons, the Bashaws, the Grandees, the Patricians, the Sachems, the Nabobs, call them by what Name you please, Sigh, and groan, and frett, and Sometimes Stamp, and foam, and curse- but all in vain. The Decree is gone forth, and it cannot be recalled, that a more equal Liberty, than has prevail’d in other Parts of the Earth, must be established in America. That Exuberance of Pride, which has produced an insolent Domination, in a few, a very few oppulent, monopolizing Families, will be brought down nearer to the Confines of Reason and Moderation, than they have been used.”
- John Adams, letter to Patrick Henry, June 3, 1776
The great miracle of the United States was that the Founders demonstrated to the world that a philosophically and politically polyglot people could, on its own, discern the ills of its society and apply to them a functioning resolution that drew as much on a moral code as on a practical mechanism for uniting the disparate interests of a nation that had no historical antecedent. They had done far more than throw off the overbearing burden of a distant tyrant. They had re-imagined the notion of modern community.
Peeling back the many layers of our identity is a complicated process whose solution is often smothered by the discovery of much that lies hidden within the confounding topography of our history, and by the realization that we have, so often and so utterly convincingly, fooled ourselves. Yet this is the United States. We have, by sheer dint of natural wealth, indomitable creative will, and splendid isolation, succeeded far beyond the wildest dreams of our forebears. Still, our inability to readily commit ourselves to a single, unifying belief system remains. We are not easily convinced that someone else knows better. We are complicated, and divided by nature. Tracing each characteristic of our nature commits us to recognizing that a complex, dendritic network of intersecting influences and interrelated decisions and events shaped our perceptions of ourselves and of others. It is impossible, and unfair, to look at one facet of our collective experiences without looking at the others that exerted force upon us or colored our understanding of the individuals and events that describe our evolution as a society. It is, by any definition, a demanding task. If truth has been the first and most lasting casualty of our search for our identity, than the next has been clarity. If it is true that the focal point of our identity has become the ideological divide that has polarized our politics, then we must recognize that a number of differing forces and concepts constantly pull and push us one way or another, if we seek to understand it. Not every issue or circumstance that stands before us should resolve itself into two opposing views made irreconcilable by the debt they owe to the obstinacy of hardened ideologies, yet it is more often than not so. Perhaps there is a sort of comforting symmetry to living in a society rendered into two hostile camps; or it may be that our social and intellectual fabric is far more complicated and nuanced than we wish to believe. What we can be certain of, though, is that no event or point of view relevant to an examination of our history has existed in a vacuum. There are no neat beginnings and endings in history, only trends and shadings of what we believe to be true and impactful. Nor are there convenient, easily understood definitions and instances of cause and effect that are universal and predictable. Nationhood is something that more often than not escapes being pinned to the present. Nationhood answers the human need to separate out the milling throngs of us into discrete units that share similarities and minimize differences. At least, this is how nations begin. Perhaps there is a degree of national maturity or prosperity that minimizes our similarities and sharpens our sense of our differences. So, too, for our sense of identity.
Human nature dictates that we have a sense of time limited to our belief in the primacy of the present. We see a problem or a challenge or a crisis arise and we look for an immediate reason for it; and, therefore, an immediate solution. Yet there would be no continuing confrontation in the Middle East without the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Treaty of Versailles; there would have been no American middle class without John D. Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford; no Vietnam without our misunderstanding of the intricacies of the relationship between Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China; no suburban society without industrial innovation; no Cold War without Truman’s buildup of our nuclear capabilities and the Marshall Plan creating a Western Europe worth saving; no modern populism without Huey Long and Father Coughlin; no modern America without the New Deal; no global Pax Americana without the two World Wars; no red scares without the end of our isolationism; no entitlement state without Progressive Era liberalism; no diminution of the ranks of the middle class without small-government conservatism; no partisan divide without the civil rights movement; no civil rights without slavery; no Syria without Iraq and Afghanistan; no liberal, secular public schooling without the Scopes Trial; no alternate ideological archetypes without the relentless force of irony and surprise in history; no sense of identity without a sense of social context; no rule of law without its converse, left-wing and right-wing extremism. In each of these issues, there are pale shades of judgements made well and judgements misapplied; there were, and are, lost opportunities and great leaps of faith and inspiration. There is little that is clear and certain, much that is open to interpretation and the dulling gravitational pull of preconceived notions. We are still learning what the legacy of our origins demands of us, if it demands of us anything at all.
Older societies than ours look to the past to find the guidance they need for the future; in America, we look to the future to reconcile our convictions about our past. In a certain sense, this is wholly justified. In any detailed assessment of the issues affecting our current lives, it becomes clear that the rapid and ongoing transformation of every social, political, technological, economic, and intellectual condition of our existence that is emblematic of our country’s evolution has elevated the effects and importance of recent events above those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While conventional examinations of our development ascribe our identity to the words and actions of the Founders, to the ferment of the Revolution, and to the trials of the Civil War, it has become difficult to identify precisely how those great events relate to our society and culture now. This is not to diminish the importance of any of these seminal events in our history, yet, upon closer examination, it must be noted that the shape and vocabulary of our present state can be directly attributed to the transforming effects of the Great Depression and the Second World War, when the relationship between the government and the people was changed forever. Since the 1930s, American society has transformed itself time and again. At every such juncture, much has been lost, and much gained. What is most unsettling, and, perhaps, most accountable for our continuing social and political polarization, is that the frequency with which our society is transformed is accelerating. We have been where we are now before, yet we do not recognize history’s repetitive habits. We were transformed in the 1930s and 1940s; we were transformed again in the 1950s and 1960s; it seems now that every decade, even every few years, brings with it a new moment of defining change. The new millennium has begun to resemble the late 1960s, when everything that we had believed we knew about ourselves came under assault from every direction. Then, we divided ourselves accordingly, as we do now. Yet we settled nothing, as we do now.
The great conundrum of the post-World War II years has been whether we would remain a nation- what the Founders replaced England with, or simply become a place, notable more for the divisions that set us against one another to the extent that we might fairly describe ourselves as belonging to a Balkans of ideas. We cultivate and dote on our partisan differences. Moreover, we are impatient to move forward into a future we know less of than we think, while we are impatient to go back to a past that really never was what we believe it was. We long for a return to ideals and truths that we place in our past, yet we are unsure of, or even ignorant of, exactly what those ideals and truths are or represent. We tout “opportunity” as elemental to the American identity, yet there is no one “American” definition of it; it is more accurate to treat opportunity as a creed- or an ambiguous truism- than it is to point to specific, immutable examples of opportunity in practice; moreover, opportunity means many things to many different people. We would rather embrace either of these myths than correct our social and political institutions we have surrounded ourselves with. It is, then, to be expected that we will remain divided indefinitely. If we could take the time to admit our mistakes, and reach a better understanding of the currents of history that have made us who we are, we might be more amenable to solving the issues that set us against one another, rather than to simply rearm our disagreements with a more refined and hardened form of alienation from one another. Our emotions- real and forced upon us by the rhetoric of our willingness to allow politicization to define our sense of ourselves- have made us insensitive to the bankruptcy of our desire for community. The following is a Japanese parable about subjective perception and how we use it to relate to the world around us- a world of our own making- and to one another:
“Two men were arguing about a flag flapping in the wind.
‘It’s the wind that is really moving,’ stated the first one. ‘No, it is the flag that is moving,’ contended the second.
A Zen master, who happened to be walking by, overheard the debate and interrupted them. ‘Neither the flag nor the wind is moving,’ he said, ‘It is MIND that moves.’”
It may be that the divisiveness we point to so often as the root problem in our uncivil society owes its venom and rancor to our inability to allow ourselves to have our minds changed. Yet changing minds- replacing traditional ideals with the product of the radical dissent that fostered our freedom- is what made this nation what it is.
There was a time- not so long ago- when one in seven of us- that is, four million out of twenty-eight million- were owned, the property of someone else, according to the protection of private property afforded their masters by the Constitution. When change finally came, it came with neither with the assent of the public, nor with any provisions made for the personal safety of many of those who undertook the risks necessary to bring it about, aside from the vague protections granted them by the Constitution; the same Constitution that allowed their assassins the rights necessary to take someone else’s life.
“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
- Abraham Lincoln, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838
“The world has faced about, and has found its true front.
Vast geographical and social differences, strengthened by rivalry and variety, are blended, balanced, and united by permanent accord with the order of nature.
Slavery is radically abolished and exiled forever from the continents of America, Asia, and Europe. Universal citizenship, education, and intelligence create, expand, and perpetuate themselves.
The emancipated mind of the world, reinforced by numbers and powers of self-government, marches with majesty and moderation from victory to victory.
In the littleness of mortality we may yet recognize the divine miracle, which closes the cycle of conquest and slavery in the world, that humanity may enter upon a new departure, illuminated by universal freedom.”
These words were not the airy musings of some New Age idealist, nor are they the expression of some contemporary iteration of a naïve globalism. The year was 1873; the words those of the promoter of American spiritual hegemony, William Gilpin (from Mission of the North American People, Geographical, Social, and Political). They are, even allowing for the errors anyone can manufacture when taking ideas and statements out of their proper context, more instructive in how they shed light on how far events and deeds can go awry than they are indicative of the results of the genuine hope offered humanity by the American experiment in a world where the ancient instincts that drive us to pursue power and wealth by any means carries the day. The awful lessons of the twentieth century are enough to make us- anyone, in fact- question our belief in ourselves. Gilpin was correct in his recognition of the potential that the reintegration of the Union implied for the dangerous world of the late nineteenth century. He rightly read out of the flowering of the young American nation the promise of the moment that lay dawning before us. Yet he gravely underestimated the persistence of human nature.
“This Nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.
This is one country. It has become one country because all of us and all the people who came here had an equal chance to develop their talents. We cannot say to ten percent of the population that you can’t have that right; that your children cannot have the chance to develop whatever talents they have; that the only way that they are going to get their rights is to go in the street and demonstrate. I think we owe them and we owe ourselves a better country than that.”
- John F. Kennedy, Report to the American People on Civil Rights, June 11, 1963
Perhaps we are no more impatient with anything or anyone than we are with ourselves. Francesco Petrarca, better known as Petrarch, the Humanist scholar and poet of early Renaissance Italy, unknowingly underscored the distinction that would sunder forever the linkage between the Old World spiritual sensibilities of Europe from the libertarian sensibilities of New World America. As he undertook a spiritual and literal journey of self-discovery in April of 1336 by scaling the imposing limestone mass of Mont Ventoux- an outlier of the French Alps in Provence- Petrarch was moved to try and fit his impressions into the Christian traditions of his education. As he subsequently recounted in a letter to Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro, he chanced to lay open his volume of St. Augustine’s Confessions, wherein he found a passage he paraphrased in this manner: “And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the seas, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.” True enough, for the Europe of our origins. Yet in the new nation which came to be, and to an ever-increasing degree in the times in which we live, it would seem that Americans have turned Augustine’s admonition to the faithful on its head. We examine only ourselves, at the expense of our understanding of and affinity for our neighbors, community, nation, and the wider world. And even then we only look as closely as our tribal instincts demand. Divided as we are, we have forced choices upon ourselves, something for which we have little experience to guide us. Americans have, for all of the history of our existence, forced choices on others. Yet others now have the will, and, as a byproduct of the transferal of our ideals and institutions across the face of the globe, quite often the means, to resist us, or equal us. Globalization has made much of the rest of the world as ambitious and successful as we have been; there is perhaps no better manifestation of the complexity of the historical process than the manner by which the tides of history have been, in our eyes, turned against us. However, we have neither been played false nor victimized by forces real or imagined in witnessing this. Our perception of ourselves, of others, of the mechanics of social, economic, and political evolution represents a reflection of our willingness to place disunion and self-interest above compromise and tolerance. Is this the true measure of our identity? We face many choices- this in itself is deeply unsettling, and conducive to divisiveness. The choices we face are expressed in political, economic, and ideological terms; yet there are also choices before us that are entirely moral and metaphysical. Our lack of unity makes it all the more likely that many of our choices will turn to ill. As we separate from one another, we fall prey at an increasing rate to the darker side of our tendency to compete against another. We are now deeply suspicious of anyone who holds differing views. There may be no practical way to reverse the politicization of our lives, yet we have brought this on ourselves, and must answer for the fallout of our words and deeds. We do not know if we can truly be satisfied with improving the society in which we live, yet that is the challenge of our times. There is no reason for our divisiveness other than the pursuit of empowerment, of winning; and, it seems, there is no emotionally satisfying substitute for believing that we are winning. It may be, though, that defeating ourselves- nullifying unity and a common sense of identity- does not constitute winning, nor connote power. We can rise at the expense of our neighbors, or we can all fall together and remain subservient to the acrimony of purified, intransigent ideologies and self-righteousness.
There is, however, neither comfort nor validation in such togetherness. It is a choice fraught with uncertainty, with false solutions, with lies sold as truths, and with unknowable consequences, yet it is not without precedent. It is a choice that has accompanied every moment of our history as a nation. We are possessed of great gifts of wealth, power, conscience, compassion, ambition, and ability. We have it within ourselves to shape the world around us, and that within which we live. We have the ability, and, perhaps, the will, to drive the decisions and events that will mold the future. We have lived a history that is as replete with triumph and virtue as it is stained with tragedy and shame. Whether our knowledge of our past is to serve as an enlightening precedent upon which a better way for all may be based or if our past is no more than a prologue that foreshadows deliberate excesses of the darker artifacts of our identity is ours alone to decide.
