Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken but simply unfinished
— Amanda Gorman
To celebrate the nation’s birth, turn to Biden’s first Inaugural poet. A nation is best when it sees itself striving toward its ideals — not when it claims to have arrived, and least of all when it aims backward at some vague, mythologized, and fundamentally unjust past.
That’s why a slaveholder can still inspire with soaring rhetoric. The founders got the ideas close to right. Two hundred fifty years on, we’re still reaching for them. That’s the progress: getting there, never there.
And for the descendants of the people those founders enslaved, the inspiration is sharper still. To find hope in America is one thing. To find hope in this America — the one in front of us — is the harder, truer thing.
Consider Amanda Gorman. Read the whole poem — or listen to her deliver it above — this holiday season. The lines that move me most are the ones a Florida district decided its elementary schoolchildren shouldn’t read: the nation Gorman describes isn’t broken, she says, only unfinished.
How do you celebrate our nation’s past? Share your inspiration.