A New Year and an Unpaid Debt: Honoring the Bill of Gratitude

 

A question, in lieu of a New Year’s resolution: To whom do we, as Americans, owe thanks?

 

Do the healthy and wealthy among us have a debt, to be repaid with gratitude to a generous nation? Do our privileged and educated sons and daughters have a moral obligation to repair this country?

 

Do we need, in short, emissaries of goodwill; ambassadors who will brave the unknown (to them) city schools and public housing units, where we continue to consign multiple generations to endure criminal violence, licensed brutality and not-so-benign neglect from overworked teachers, police officers and counselors?

 

These questions are, thus, the same question: What kind of country do we want to be?

 

Shall 2015 be another year where we succumb to statistics, and blind ourselves through the anonymity of numbers rather than the unforgettable images of faces?

 

For the time approaches when social division from an undeclared civil war will become permanent; when our tale of two cities will be a contrast so vivid and unbridgeable that the United States may just as well become a vast wasteland flanked by extraordinary riches at one extreme and uninterrupted darkness at the other.

 

We risk choosing between Beverly Hills and Detroit, which is no choice at all.

 

So, when I write about gratitude – and I have much to be thankful for, starting with the love of a husband whose spirit is my constant companion and the gifts (to do good by doing well) bestowed upon me – I know what the alternative is.

 

It is bleak and unjust . . . for everyone.

 

To the fortunate, of which I am one, I issue this reminder: We must not descend into a land of plutocrats and an impoverished proletariat.

 

We must not allow children – innocents scarred by vermin, and beaten by bullies – to become the raw materials of the State, which will convert flesh and blood into ghastly ingredients; placing these girls and boys, most of whom are black or Hispanic, on a conveyor belt that will clothe and feed them in reformatories, and bus them to county jails and graduate them to prisons, until – after this machinery has stamped, pressed and catalogued each inmate – the armed guards of this substitute “parent” will send each forsaken man-child to his grave.

 

What, then, should we do to stop the passive acceptance of this vicious cycle of delay and denial? In a word: Volunteer!

 

Volunteer because our country needs you.

 

Volunteer because, in the absence of action, the distance between Beverly Hills and Detroit will narrow; the latter will become a fire so great that its perverted lights will burn us all, reducing Americans to the same fate as those late men whose ashes fertilize the soil of potter’s field.

 

Volunteer because, if we remember only fragments of those 31 sacred words of childhood, we are “one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

 

And therein lies the reason to volunteer: Our oneness as a republic, where freedom rings from the “prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire” and “the mighty mountains of New York.”

 

Let freedom ring!

 

Let freedom ring, so opportunity can flourish.

 

Let freedom ring, so we can be a people united again.

 

Let freedom ring, so those who have known nothing but hate can bask in the warmth of hope.

 

Let freedom ring in 2015, and echo every year thereafter because, We the People of the United States hereby resolve to form a more perfect Union.

 

We, those who have secured the blessings of a mighty nation, must be gracious in our words and righteous in our deeds.

 

Let freedom ring!

 

Elizabeth Rice Grossman