Home stretch

It is suddenly the last week of my fellowship. This has been a historic time, in a historic fellowship. I may be stepping out of a country that will never be the same again. I may have seen the last of the America I knew before… or maybe not. We will see how the coming days turn out to be. I have seen different aspects of America from close quarters. It has been a hidden blessing of this fellowship, that I will carry along with me memories of a city stretched between two giants. The tension as the numbers came in. The agony and the ecstasy sharing the same space. People waking up to a morning when they no longer felt like going to work, because they did not have the president they voted for.  

It is the same crowded streets, in the city that never sleeps, but there is something else. There is a certain intangible uncertainty that was not there before. A chord has been struck that no one is comfortable hearing. It jars the senses with its truth. It is a reflection of a lingering presence that has been ignored for a long time. And now that the new chief representative of the nation may not exactly represent what the core deeply respects, it is a time of questioning. Sometimes walking around, I can hear the nation asking itself what it has become… and getting no answers. Because the ones who could give the answers, have declared themselves the invisible majority, leaving the mainstream dumbstruck.  

The ones who want to make their disappointment vocal, are free on the streets to do so.  Everyone knows how the protests will end. The system that chose the leader, secures him on the apex of the people who used it to put him there. To push too hard for him to step down, would mean sinking teeth into the toe of a tiger, usually long enough to be acknowledged and absentmindedly shaken off. The deed is done. The future now remains to indicate which direction this people have chosen to go. It is still the country where dreams come true. It is still the place to aim for the moon, push hard enough, and get to it.  

And where else to travel and see, than this place where the future blurs into today. What greater exposure than to flit through cities on Boeings and Airbuses, pausing just long enough to catch a snooze, meet great minds and take in some sights. And what better relationships than those with people who have achieved great things, and remain grounded enough to reach even higher than they have ever done. If the horizon of my imagination once began where my perception ended, it no longer does. Because my perception of what can be achieved, has been carried beyond what I imagined. And now I do not have a horizon. Just an empty void into which to launch, and fail, and rise, and fall, and sail, and dock, and live chasing the purpose that I was created for.  

As for what happens to this country I have seen so much of and owe, time will tell. It is still the only country in the world as diverse as it is and still one. It is still the most successful union of people, and minds and capacity that there has ever been, on this scale. Other unions have been attempted, and failed. This has been a century of failing union: Communist or democratic. We are seeing the strength that collaboration and inclusion brings, being sacrificed for the tragedy of exclusion, selfcentredness and paranoia. And as this chorus grows, and the cacophony of new voices, previously only whispers in the dark, transcends historic colonnades of democracy, decency and civility, may the harmony of good sense, experience and humanity prevail.  

There remains too much to be done in the world, to yield to the forces that draw apart. There are too many rivers to dam, too many mountains to climb, too many species to discover, too many people to save, to pour the potential for excellence into the cauldrons of discontent.  

The People must uphold the precious constitution that starts with ‘We the People…’