On a chilly winter morning in January 1961, John F. Kennedy walked proudly across Capitol Hill to be sworn in as the youngest president elected to office. With each snow-crunching step he took, the hopes and dreams of millions of Americans rested upon his shoulders.
In front of a crowd of 20,000 and a large television and radio audience, he uttered the now famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”
In that moment, all who heard those words were inspired to become something more than their individual selves. They were not segregated by gender, socio-economic status or race. When President Kennedy finished his famous sentence, the people who lived in America weren’t simply citizens any longer. They were Americans. A collective family who shouldered each other’s fears, who weathered each other’s struggles and worked toward the common goal of the advancement of the United States.
What few remember, however, are the words that followed JFK’s famous remarks. "My fellow citizens of the world: Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man." You see, what JFK was attempting to inspire was a passion in all mankind to work as a collective humanity toward the betterment of the world as a whole.
And the world listened.
As a nation, we safely avoided nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and we saw the first-ever nuclear test ban treaty between opposing world powers. We addressed the necessities of a civil rights movement, and we ushered in an era of human rights. Lastly, we achieved the first walk on the moon and we achieved “one giant leap for mankind."
After all of these amazing things happened, we seem to have lost this sense of not only worldwide progress but the progress of America. Now, more than ever, we seem to want not only other nations to fail but our fellow Americans to fail as well.
We root against presidents who do not share our ideology and blame our failures on others who do not want us to succeed. We clash angrily with our police, our government, even our rival sports fans — all of whom are our neighbors, our friends and our families.
Maybe it has always been this way. Maybe the way I view the spirit of the past is wrong. Maybe there was never a desire to become more than our individual selves, and what President Kennedy attempted to inspire in us over 50 years ago fell on deaf ears. After all, Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream left him dead, the Cold War lasted about 45 years and we still haven’t managed to get back to the moon since 1972.
Maybe all of that simply goes to show that the past isn’t always as great as we remember it to be — that all eras of human history have been as imperfect as the one we live in today. But then why should we not try to create the perfect present based on our selective memories of the past?
The good memories, the ones that make us smile, make us proud to be American. Further still, they are the ones that make us proud to be humans. Why not create a truly realized present on the foundation of the ideals that we are taught in school, the ones that we are proud of, the ones we remember?
Thomas Jefferson may have called it life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Others may call it equality, tolerance and success for all. I simply call it the promise of America.