Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita):
let the sun shine (1968)

Inscriptions and Marks: Signed: l.r.: Corita
Printed text reads: LET THE SUN SHINE IN
the creative revolution—to take a chunk of the imagined future and put it into the present— to follow the law of the future and live it in the present. Waskow
inscription: l.l., in graphite: 68-69-E

"Let's focus, as we almost always have, on Making America Great Like Never Before."

The American Way might be most properly described as Futuristic. We live in our future. Dissatisfied with our present, we project and take ownership of a better future. We are gleefully mortgaged. In the fifties and sixties, when I was a kid, the future seemed more present than it has ever been since. Since then, we've seen a slow erosion of who and what we were once destined to become. We grew up to disappoint ourselves. Conservatives, always a presence, began asserting a backward-looking dominion over us, as if our futures featured sin instead of the always before expected salvation. They equated mortgages with penury and our unique sort of prosperity with degradation. They worshiped tax cuts and balanced budgets, false gods from the distant past, over our proven, reliable gods from our future. They promised less and delivered worse, proving themselves wildly unpopular. They'd get elected by lying, by playing bait-and-switch politics.

Whomever reviles their future undermines their past, for our past holds no relevance except that which is delivered by its diligence. Our past will always be fleeting and perhaps fondly remembered, but it will never provide a reliable template for a more reliable future. Futures must be filled with speculation, where nothing could ever be one hundred percent guaranteed. It's the very uncertainty that renders them so alluring. Sure things carry no caché, nothing alluringly promissory. They promise an inevitable future, which amounts to nothing like a dream coming true. It's a false certainty, one never animated to stir blood or imagination. It promises more of the same in ever more undermining iterations. It stirs precisely nothing and thereby proves worthless for enlivening. Distinctly Unamerican!

When I was young, anyone could still dream of one day becoming President, and most still believed that experience might prove rewarding. A growing conservative cynicism served to undermine that sort of dreaming. Becoming President lost its allure. Engineering true greatness became a joke, replaced with Founder worship and fantasizing about tax cuts and balancing budgets. Without a national debt, we lose any real purpose to work together to create our future. We fragment to hoard our sliver of an American Dream that excludes most of what might make it one day come true. We need to be over-extended to experience a shared purpose. We need the panic that accompanies debt service to see beyond the current and into anything truly alluring. What else could ever convince us to keep returning to pursuing together? Without a mortgage, we lose the reason to continue experimenting as WE, THE PEOPLE.

Are we destined to become self-sufficient assholes? When we needed each other to accomplish our future, we kept our eyes forward. Our dissatisfaction was always considered a temporary condition, though we always eventually traded in the older model to renew our indebtedness to something even greater than before. And it was more reliably manifested, though the achievement never really fully repaid the debt incurred in achieving it. That little detail didn't matter because we achieved that future without ultimately satisfying the debt. We just rolled that debt over into the next alluring reliable, and then the next. This country was always best described as a revolving charge account, aspiring to repay but never actually able to, or needing to, either. Our children have inherited not just the tail end of the debt we incurred in creating their present, our future, but also our habit of agreeing to pay for our future far beyond what our personal reach could afford. We've always achieved greatness by over-extending and surprising ourselves.

Past achievements and past greatnesses seem out of character for us. We traditionally, conservatively, actually always exclusively sought future greatnesses. The notion of Making America Great AGAIN seems anathema to our character. Since when were we all that interested in recreating any past? We lost our taste for then the first time we tasted it for dinner. That experience inspired us to imagine even better, rather than attempting to capture and preserve what was only briefly anybody's future. We're bound for better. We're bound to better, as we experience the worst that comes from pursuing past greatness. We'll relearn that greatness is a supper we haven't yet consumed that will become moribund the moment we swallow it. Our greatness was always a promise yet to be achieved. Achieving it only ever fueled a fresh bout of disenchantment. We've always known we could do better in the future. Let's focus, then, as we almost always have before, on Making America Great Like Never Before. Every alternative seems categorically un-American.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #CHope , #PureSchmaltz