I know today is a heavy day for many of you. And for others, it’s an exciting moment.
No matter which side you’re on, there’s something I hope we can remember. And that is that hope does not arrive, unbidden, on the back of a silvery bird, deposited on our doorstep during the night.
Hope was a choice. Hope was fought for. Hope rose from the ring, bloodied and broken, to fight again.
I recently gave a TED Talk. And I wanted to share a short clip with you. You can watch the full talk here.
Here is the transcript, if you prefer to read:
What if I told you all along America has had a mission statement and not just a mission statement, but a method we are meant to use to achieve this mission, to execute the mission?
And it was Gouverneur Morris who came up with America's mission statement, and it was his idea that America at her best should be four things. America should be just, peaceful, good, and free. And now you might be thinking, why have I never heard of a mission statement?
And it goes like this: “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, to establish justice. To ensure domestic tranquility and provide for the common defense, to promote the general welfare or the common good, and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, we do ordain and establish this constitution of the United States.”
Summed up: just, peaceful, good and free.
After Alexander Hamilton dies, Gouverneur Morris goes to his funeral, and he's going to eulogize him.
It's very hot. It's summertime. Everybody's wearing like wool and they have wigs, right? And it's very crowded. They're all packed in like sardines. There's no air conditioning, there's no microphones. And he realized like he's, he's verklempt, right? Like he needs to talk to these people and he gets up and he's, he says, essentially, I don't really have anything great to say, you guys.
And what he ends with is, you're just going to have to listen to the lamentations of a bewailing friend. That's what he says. Like, I'm just really torn up. I don't have anything good to say. And he goes on to tell the story of how 17 years prior, he and Hamilton had served at the Constitutional Convention together, where they worked all summer in this hot room with a bunch of stinky people and they argued the entire summer.
He gets up and he says, “We had many reservations amongst ourselves. We did not know if the institutions we were building, if the constitution we had just written would hold. We didn't know. We didn't know if America would fall to despotic men. But we hoped better things.”
And I'm struck by that, that phrase, we hoped better things. These people who came up with these ideas, right? We tend to deify them. Like in their infinite wisdom, they came up with all the great ideas, legislative, executive, judicial, proportional representation. We tend to think that these are just like the ideas of the smartest people in the world.
And here they are saying, I don't know. I don't know if it's going to work out, you guys, but we hoped for better things, despite evidence to the contrary sometimes. We hoped for better things. Note what he does not say. He does not say a feeling of hope came over us. He does not say a beam of light descended and we just knew that everything was going to work out.
He does not say we woke up each morning, listening to the hopeful birds chirping in the hopeful sunshine, and we just knew that America's going to be wonderful in the future. And that is because hope is not a feeling. And I think too many of us are waiting to experience a feeling.
We think it's going to be like falling in love. I'm going to wait to feel the feelings. Hope is a choice. Hope is a choice. And when you make the choice every day, that is the place that you can take action from.
Watch the rest here on YouTube.