The President hit the nail on the head last night. We do big things. It is our legacy, our birthright. But, we have had a national case of the grumps that seems as much the result of constipated imaginations as any financial or spiritual failings.
I'd ask you to think big again, dream big and do big if you can. And remember and honor those whose big things are today known as the United States of America.
In 1943, Stephen Vincent Benet published the first volume of what he meant to be an epic poem of the nation's founding and settling, Western Star. Benet died before he could finish the work. He was warded a Pulitzer Prize posthumously for the first volume.
From the Invocation to Western Star, he offers these lines, an elegy for those who came here--and were here.
You shall remember them. You shall not see
Water or wheat or axe-mark on the tree
And not remember them.
You shall not win without remembering them,
For they won every shadow of the moon,
All the vast shadows, and you shall not lose
Without a dark remembrance of their loss
For they lost all and none remembered them.
Hear the wind
Blow through the buffalo-grass,
Blow over the wild-grape and brier.
This was frontier, and this,
And this, your house, was frontier.
There were footprints on the hill
And men lie buried under,
Tamers of earth and river.
They died at the end of labor,
Forgotten is the name.
Now, in full summer, by the Eastern shore,
Between the seamark and the roads going west,
I call two oceans to remember them.
I fill the hollow darkness with their names.
There is much, much more. The poem is well worth a trip to the library. And, as we are called back to our destinies, it is worth remembering those who answered their calls long -- and not so long -- ago.
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