The Burks Manifesto
These dark days for
the America psyche started with 9/11 and grow darker year by year. It's hard to imagine an era when less has seemed possible. Our
military has proven incapable of cornering the psychopath who initiated 9/11.
We're engulfed in a war most of us know to have been a mistake from its
inception. We've been lied to repeatedly, from the White
House to the Pentagon to Congress
The United States
is held in lower world esteem, and deserves it more, than at any time in memory.
The disconnect between traditional American idealism and the
dismal reality confronting us leaves most Americans uncertain how to turn this
nation around.
You hear it all the time: "Nothing I could possibly do will make
any difference."
This national
state of depression-and the need to work our way out of it-underlines why I am
involved with AWARE. AWARE's job is to remind you how much you can do to make a
difference for your fellow man-from volunteering for youth groups to writing
checks supporting your favorite causes to organizing groups to assure topflight
health care- and so much more. AWARE's mission is to show how we can all pitch
in, and to serve as a beacon to light the way beyond the national sense of
helplessness and desperation.
As I assume my new responsibilities at AWARE, I think back to
the song "American Tune," written by Paul Simon in the bleak afterglow of
Vietnam. Paul Simon put it in personal terms. He felt mistaken, often confused,
forsaken, "certainly misused"; every dream "shattered, or driven to its knees."
Simon couldn't help wondering why-"I can't help it, I wonder what has gone
wrong." He spoke for a generation.
Except for one fleeting stanza, "American Tune" suggests that
it's over for us. But this one stanza reminds us that, unless we totally forget
and dismiss who we are and what we stand for, Americans remain fully capable of
acting up to our ideals, and our desire to create a better world.
We come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age's most uncertain hours
and sing an American tune
AWARE's responsibility is to sing that American tune. I hope
we can sing that tune well enough to help provide succor in all corners of the
world. Sing it with a spirit that will return America's collective psyche into
the light.
