To Be Extant
When we think about the course of history, what is remembered, what is lasting, we find ourselves on a slippery slope. We remember the great leaders, the Roosevelt, Washington, Solomon, Augustus. But our memory of them fades, their imprint on humanity is shallower than we think at first pass. How many leaders have been great over the thousands of years that have been forgotten or relegated to obscurity. We remember Stone Henge, the Pyramids, the paintings of Lascaux. The monuments and momenta of civilizations, demanding to be recognized and remembered. But these too expire. Our earth will eliminate even these hardiest of bookmarks.
We live in a universe marked by the march of time. The gradual dispersal of everything into nothing. Order to Chaos. Physicists call this heat death. Religions call it end times. It is fundamental to our universe that order, and advancement run counter to the natural progression of time. Life itself is a fluke blip on this march toward cold chaos. But how beautiful it is to see life, in its fragile, roaring audacity, challenge this march. It is illogical and passionate and quixotic in its endless insistence that it deserves to exist. Our planet especially, teeming with life, raises it's flippant fist to the universe and demands a present that is different from how it should be. It crafts and creates complexity where simplicity should exists. It trudges and pushes advancement where degeneration is the cosmic norm. We evolve and advance as species, adapting to change by getting better and more intricate, not simpler and easier.
Our being alive is an audacious insistence that we can be better than our circumstances say we should be. And there has never been a society more representative of this moxie than America. From our birth we have been a country that doesn't settle for what is reasonable, practical. We have plunged forth at great cost to say, "We will make the impossible possible." For our history we have rejected the promise and ease of simplicity and stagnation. We are a country striving for a shining city on a hill, one that believes in the audacity of hope. We are a society that knows each step toward perfection means perfection moves one step further away. Because to keep going we must insist on being better and better every century, every generation, every day. We are fighting, fearlessly, insolently against the forces of history that try to tell us we will be forgotten. We are raging against the very nature of the universe, that tells us all is simply the dying of the light. We will build a better tomorrow not because it's easy, or because the universe says we should, but because we can. And because we owe it to ourselves to do all that we can do. We owe it to ourselves to build great structures, to create cities and infrastructure and inventions that are the stuff of fantasy and fiction. We owe it to ourselves to create and support art and culture that surpasses our greatest human achievements every day. We owe it to ourselves to make a society where people are valued and elevated in ways thought to be utopian. We owe all this to ourselves because we exist. Even though everything says we shouldn't. So we will burn bright and strong together, and not throw away our shot to be beautiful and complex. We will not be a blip in the history of time. We will begin the great counter-fire, that blazes defiantly against the dark gnawing of chaos. We will be great because we have been given the chance to be. And a chance is all we've ever needed.
