Greetings to you all as we reconcile 2025, welcome the winter solstice, and lean into 2026.
As you may recall, I have been absent from this post for some months with purpose. Writing my next book— Witness to Empire—is coming along. As I write this message, I have made it from dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945 to Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video in the mid-1980s; just forty more years to go. Yes, I am covering it all while weaving my own life into the fabric of an emerging empire. Rather than writing a memoir, I am using my life as lens to elucidate the story of America in the contemporary age. (Yes, I did play an extremely small—infinitesimal—role in making Thriller the best-selling album of all time.)
Of course, I am not ignoring today even while I attempt to moderate my consumption of current events in favor of a scintilla of sanity. I just prefer reflecting on times when we were better Americans. History is where I reach for lessons even while the future is where I stake my hope while deeply breathing in the present moment. And while my forthcoming book identifies the critical wounds our nation has endured that compromise its longevity as an empire, we should remember that America is, after all, more an of idea, an experiment, an ambition than it is a fully formed and durable enterprise. At the essence of that idea is failure; not because we aim for it, but because it inevitably lights our path to success if we maintain warm hearts and open minds.
As we face the many celebrations next year of America at 250 years of age, we have a fundamental decision to make: shall we cue the dirgical music of the death of an empire, or do as those did during the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and World War II, and pull ourselves up by the bootstraps of our character and take our future back from the scoundrels who seek to divide us while lining their pockets and mantelshelf with gold?
In prior American crises, leadership at the national level got us through and we emerged stronger as a nation and empire—an empire that eventually became the most powerful in the history of the world. To be clear, the history of empires suggests ours will fall too. It would be ahistorical to expect otherwise. No civilization has ever found the answer to a durable scheme of governance—of organizing for the common good—that did not eventually fail. But those who would argue that our natural disposition is one of loathing each other rather than loving each other; of those who would argue we are predisposed to disunity over unity, I ask why then do we always—since antiquity—return to trying to get it right again? Why do we prefer to be together rather than being alone?
We have had three foundings in American history. The first one we readily acknowledge with the events following the American Revolution that established America as the “Land of the Free” with leaders like Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington. The second had Abraham Lincoln as its shepherd that was largely affected later under Ulysses S. Grant that began the “Land of Opportunity.” The third, begun by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that was completed by Truman and Eisenhower when America became a “Superpower.” And now, we face a fourth founding opportunity, but the outcome is, at best, highly suspect. Unfortunately today, we do not have national leaders who understand this important history of coming together again and righting the ship of America. We have no cohesive vision around which to rally. Under today’s leadership, those bootstraps of character have become levers of avarice. Cruelty has replaced compassion as the currency of the realm. Our leader’s eyes are cast upon their navels like infants rather than lifted toward the horizon of tomorrow.
It is, therefore, a challenge of summons. To summon the courage of George Washington as he and his troops crossed the Delaware River on Christmas night, 1776, to face insurmountable odds against the British. To summon those better angels Abraham Lincoln spoke of in his First Inaugural Address on March 4, 1861. To summon the knowing, as Franklin Roosevelt implored us in 1933, that we had “nothing to fear but fear itself” as the nation had plunged into depression and would subsequently face fascists who were trying to take over the world. And, more recently, when Ronald Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin in 1987 to summon Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall!”, the light of America’s shining city upon a hill shown brighter still.
It should be further acknowledged on this eve of our nation’s 250th birthday that the founders did not mean that “the pursuit of happiness” was measured in pleasures of a shallow and transient nature; rather, they meant to describe a state of well-being that is invested in virtues and judged by character. Happiness was staked in morality, not in the latest delivery from Amazon.
So, it is up to us. To each one of us to make our world, however large or small, a better place. If one ant can change the success of an entire mound, then we surely can have an impact too, as individuals in our own families, communities, states and maybe, just maybe, our nation and the world. After all, we are the keystone species in the most powerful nation in the world.
It is in this spirit of greater Americans that I wish you and yours a happy holiday and a prosperous new year. And, as always, my blessing for you:
May you wake in glory,
Enjoy your day with grace,
And spend your night in peace.
Glory,
Grace,
Peace.
