33 Days Before The 4th of July, I Looked Out My Office Window and Thought of This...

There were lives before us, lived mostly by men who chipped stone and died under falling steel and clouds of soot. There were men in railcars driving steam engines across a country still new with possibilities. At the front of each train men and women in formal attire rode in luxury. In the rear cars there were men and women in simple clothing crammed on wooden seats, aching, staring with sore eyes at passing buffalo. They would make their fortunes in the west. They would send money to their loved ones who would see those buffalo in luxury.

Bridges made impossible fords over absurd distances. Canals cut unthinkable gullies through the hills, and the awesome tops of steamships were visible from our backyards. They built a city on quicksand. They build a city in the dessert.

We were new and nothing to an old, cynical and sophisticated world--a backwoods sociopolitical experiment doomed to fail. But we rose giant-like through clouds of soot and falling steel. And they looked the other way. We strode faster and rose taller, and still they looked the other way.

And we grew. And we grow. And we are Colossus. They can’t look anywhere without seeing us. But hands that move in opposite directions burden our enormous shoulders. One hand trembles with inconsistency and fear. It acts and reacts with violence. It digs deeply into the earth without regret.

While the other, like a magician’s hand, still waves itself over hats thought useless, and produces genius, grabbed round the ears and displayed triumphantly to the world. Some look away as if blinded, while others run toward it.

They run like men and women rumbling west on railcars through the buffalo. They stare like children at the tops of steamships. They dream of rising tall enough to caress those burdened shoulders. They dream of those two hands coming together. They dream of greatness without folly, and magic without slight-of-hand.