OPINION: Future graduates, have hope for a more perfect union

All over the country, people are emerging from high schools, colleges and universities carrying a freshly minted degree.

With this tool in hand, America’s rising generation joins the ranks of the architects of America’s future. Suddenly they are launched head-first into pursuing gainful employment, raising families and contributing to their communities. 

However, this rising generation has a question for us: “What hope do we have for our future?”

Commencement speakers across the country valiantly attempt to answer this question. It’s a heroic task considering America’s increasing political turmoil, rancor and divisiveness. 

This year, the well-known American documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, rose to the task as he addressed the graduates at Brandeis University (https://bit.ly/KenBurnsSpeech). In his remarkable speech, he recognized that because of the unprecedented challenges we are facing as a country, it is impossible to stay on the political sidelines. 

Burns began by saying that our nation’s only significant enemies are our own citizens. Our neighbors to the north and the south are not poised for war, nor do they have any reason to be. 

The worst threats we face are home-grown. 

To support his point, Burns drew from the words of Americans who were called upon to lead during times of turmoil, rancor and divisiveness.  

More than 20 years before the Civil War nearly ended our democracy, Abraham Lincoln presciently pointed out that if America dies it will be because we kill it: “As a nation of free men, we must live through all time, or die by suicide." 

Fast forwarding to the present day, Burns then pointed out what is all too obvious. Americans are divided, and we are obsessed with arguments: “Everything is either right or wrong, red state or blue state, young or old, gay or straight, rich or poor, Palestinian or Israeli, my way or the highway.”

Furthermore that division has psychological costs. To illustrate, Burns quotes from James Baldwin who believed that our binary way of looking at the world deceives us and enslaves us to false doctrines. "Anti-Semites, for example, are slaves to a delusion. People who hate Negroes are slaves. People who love money are slaves.” 

Abraham Lincoln and James Baldwin both knew, “that the enemy is often us … Everywhere we are trapped by these old tired binary reactions, assumptions, and certainties.”

Addressing the “multitudes” of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans who say they don’t like Donald Trump but “cannot bring themselves to vote for Joe Biden,” Burns said there is “no equivalence between the candidates.”

The Republican has a “deformed soul.”

And to illustrate this bold assertion, Burns quoted from the Revolutionary-era philosopher Mary Otis Warren. Warren wrote that a deformed human soul is revealed in a person whose “checks of conscience are thrown aside.”

Burns told the graduates, “The presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of all opioids, an easy cure for what some believe is the solution to our myriad pains and problems. When in fact with him, you end up re-enslaved with an even bigger problem, a worse affliction and addiction, ‘a bigger delusion,’ James Baldwin would say, the author and finisher of our national existence, our national suicide as Mr. Lincoln prophesies.”

Burns closed his graduation speech with these directives: “Choose honor over hypocrisy, virtue over vulgarity, discipline over dissipation, character over cleverness, sacrifice over self-indulgence. Do not lose your enthusiasm, in its Greek etymology the word enthusiasm means simply, ‘God in us.’ Serve your country. Denounce oppression everywhere.”

And be sure to vote.

What hope do graduates have for the future? The answer lies in how individually committed we are to building a More Perfect Union. 

We would all do well to keep Ken Burns’ words in mind.

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Evan Koch is chairman of the Kootenai County Democrats.