July 2022

As we go back to our discussion timeline—interrupted by my educational “Preamble”—the dominant assertion has become “this land is my land.” As suggested in the Preamble, there are now so many nationalities and age ranges represented, and so many conflicts have emerged, that “Go west, young man” has become separatist fighting words. The language of the Constitution about equality and shared values and memories of pre-“American” values have weakened. As George Santayana warned, “Progress depends on retentiveness . . . when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are con-demned to repeat.” Indeed, we need to add another caution, granted us by Helen Keller: “I learned that the power to rise in the world is not within reach of everyone.” With that came John Soule’s hopeful, yet cautious, charge: “Go west, young man, go west, and grow up with the land.” Even as we look to that hope, we also have to recall the bias enshrined in Meriwether Lewis’ assertion: “We were about to penetrate a country two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden; the good or evil it had in store for us was experiment yet to determine.” For breadth I add this political observation from Alexander Hamilton: “Civil liberty is only natural liberty, modified and secured by the sanctions of civil society. It is not a thing, in its own nature, precarious and dependent on human will and caprice; but it is conform-able to the constitution of man, as well as necessary to the well-being of society.”