So What Do We Do With Tomorrow,,,,?

America has always been a tomorrow place. Missions not memories have been our genetic code. We leave it to older cultures like Europe and Asia to honor the past, while we roll up our entrepreneurial sleeves and sculpture the future. Which, frankly, still makes us the exciting land of opportunity so many foreigners still hope to call home....!

And yet, we do have yesterdays and we do occasionally take them out like the family album on special holidays and anniversaries. The question is not what we find in these yesterdays, but what we should find? Are our 233 years of yesterdays something we simply tuck into history books and carve into statues? Calcifying yesterdays this way can steal them of their power.

This power is often claimed by self-described conservatives who insist the-way-it-was is most often the-way-it-should-be. And so from Sarah Palin to Rush Limbaugh to the Wall Street Journal to the Bible Belt we are warned of creeping urbanism, socialism, government and sodomy respectively.

But they appropriate -- rape, really -- the power that is yesterday. Let the record show that yesterday's power in our personal and national lives is a force to be lived not labeled. Our collective yesterdays are a theatre of life as we and our forefathers have been living and growing it for over a dozen exceptional generations. This makes these yesterdays a panoramic stage set in which we play our present roles. Always facing the audience and the future, but never ignoring the backstage crews and directors who helped mount this production in the first place.

Perhaps, then, some credit is due these crews, directors and props so often ignored simply because they cannot be seen. A credit listing in the audience's stage-bill so that both they and we the players can draw from the power they have invested in all this.

Everyone's list of credits may be slightly different, but here are a few impressionist thoughts on the matter....

The early settlers subduing the wilderness without pillaging the natives....the Minutemen and their long-rifles on the April fields of Lexington and Concord....the Founding Fathers on a hot July in Philadelphia signing our freedom in their signatures...the covered wagon trains injecting new cultures into the ancient wilds of the West...a bearded man from Illinois saving the Union and freeing the slaves...two different Roosevelts in the White House at two perilous times in our nation's history...the vigor of a Kennedy, the vitality of a Reagan, the vision of an Obama!

And, not to be forgotten, the apron-ed mothers waiting for their kids to come home from school....the sweaty fathers whose labors could be seen and felt not only calculated and computed....neighbors you knew by name...newspaper boys still delivering the newspaper you counted on holding in your hand...the easy-walk-to mom&pop shops, produce markets, gas stations, movie houses, schools and churches....family picnics, sleeping in the parks, weddings of virgin white, corner kids toting baseball bats not firearms....cocky young trail-blazers still humble enough to understand their frontiers were possible only because their out-of-touch elders had reached them before!

Here's to our best yesterdays, because without remembering them we are all amnesiacs....