The Slings & Arrows of Outrageous Fortune
While we find ourselves and our current state of affairs in the words of the media, our greater reality may be best and most accurately captured in words written hundreds of years rather than 30 seconds ago...
The difference is America is not dead, and if we stop for a moment and consider how we want to come together to tell our story rather than how violently we might erase the lessons of our past we might find a future fit for us all.
I’m no Shakespeare, but America has, one way or the other, borne us on her back a thousand times - she wants us to help her grow - not saddle her with lamentations and consider not the wheat but only the chaff. We can help return her to most excellent fancy in the songs, the gibes and the gambols that reflect who we are and what she can be - and what all might be who call her home. Let America roar once more - in the joy of our collective opportunities and liberty. Forgive our wrongs in the name of America’s future, but never forget the past - the triumphs as well as the tragedies. Work today for tomorrow so our and our loved one’s children can tell theirs they come from the greatest nation ever shone down on by the sun, and what we did together for all in the future - by working hard in the sunlight as well as the shadow of our, of America’s, past.
“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times, and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. —Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chapfallen? Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come. Make her laugh at that...”
-Hamlet, William Shakespeare - 1609