The Making of a Nation

This past week a friend and I went to NYC for vacation. New York is one of my favorite cities in the world. I come alive there in a different way than anywhere else. We stayed at a friend’s apartment in the Bronx and took the subway or walked everywhere. The weather was perfect: brisk, cloudy, rainy, and snowy one night!

I had a Nathan’s hotdog for lunch every day and we hit my favorite haunts: the New York Public Library, Central Park, the Brooklyn Museum of Art (Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party is on permanent display there!) and, of course, Broadway.

We saw three shows, The Waitress starring Sara Barielles, The Parisian Woman, starring Uma Thurman, and, how could we come to New York and not see the hit musical, Hamilton??

I have listened to the soundtrack of Hamilton for months but nothing prepared me for its power and beauty. No wonder it won 11 Tonys, including best musical. The first Secretary of Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, seems an unlikely subject for such theatrical success, yet, listening to the soundtrack, I got it. Here was a retelling of the Revolution and our earliest days as a nation not told in the dry, academic style of textbooks; rap is the music of Revolution in this show.

The fact that the cast is racially diverse with African American and Latinos playing the parts of our august forebears makes this even more electrifying. This is not your staid, whitewashed Revolution. This is earthy, gritty and filled with the indomitable hope of those yearning to break free; this Revolution is edgy and sexy and real. In one song, Hamilton sings, I am not throwing my shot! I am not throwing away my shot! Yo, I’m just like my country: I’m young, scrappy, and hungry, and I’m not throwing my shot!

What was it like, then, I wondered, when our country was young, scrappy, and hungry? What was it like to be at the forefront of building a new nation? To be so committed to liberty that you were willing to die for it?

As I witness the unfolding of this new administration in Washington, DC in bas relief against the boisterous spirit of Hamilton I can’t help but think that somewhere along the way we’ve lost the vision that our forebears had, imperfect though it was, in its fledging state, depicted in the musical with one exchange between Hamilton and Aaron Burr about the constitution, Burr says, The constitution’s a mess! Hamilton replies, so it needs amendments. Burr: It’s full of contradictions! Hamilton: so is independence.

Maybe that’s what we’ve forgotten: independence, democracy, is not a black and white matter, there isn’t a right way and a wrong way. There is only a commitment to find the best way, the way makes room at the table for the most people.  Throughout the presidential election and in the  first year of this new regime, what I’ve seen is an attempt to turn our democratic process into a reality show, even though it doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to the reality of our citizens. Outrageous claims have taken the place of civil discourse, including proclamations of building walls to keep others out, forgetting that immigrants are what made this country great in the first place (One line sung by Lafayette and Hamilton: Immigrants! We get the job done!)

What would happen if we returned to the values upon which we were founded, values of freedom, inclusion, diversity, and a spirit that recognized that we are always imperfect, full of contradictions, in need of amendments, and apologies and reparation and grace?

We still don’t have it down, 240 years later. Racism and intolerance are still embedded institutionally and culturally; we weep over the needless deaths of unarmed Black men, women, and children, feel outrage over the treatment of Muslims, forced to deplane aircraft for doing mathematical problems or wearing a head scarf. Poverty is still the reality show for 48 million Americans, according to a 2014 report from the Census Bureau.

Perhaps the call isn’t to make America great again; but rather to continue to make America, to build on the best of the foundation laid in 1776, while demolishing that which has bound us to racism, xenophobia, and the garden variety intolerance that is still rooted in our soil. Maybe what the musical Hamilton can teach us is that the language of Revolution must be sung in the language of every generation, to remind us of what a great country this is, and to plead with us to not throw away our shot to make it greater, still.