TO THE YOUNG PEOPLE WHO WILL INHERIT AMERICA
I am soon to be 73 years old.
I have lived through the aftermath of Korea, nuclear-war drills and the Cuban Missile Crisis; the assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy; Vietnam and the military draft; riots, Watergate and the fall of Saigon. I remember gas lines, runaway inflation and Americans held hostage in Iran. I watched a president, Ronald Reagan, nearly die from an assassin’s bullet. I watched the Challenger explode, the Twin Towers fall, wars begin and end, cities burn, a pandemic shut down the country—and more than four decades after Reagan was shot, I watched another assassin’s bullet come within inches of a former president.
Through all of it, I remember what it was like to be young—to look at the turmoil around me and wonder what kind of America I was going to inherit.
Young people are asking that same question today.
And that is why I want to tell them something my lifetime has taught me: America has been through dark days before. We endured them. We learned from them. We rebuilt. And the American story kept going.
The question is not whether your generation will inherit a perfect country. Mine certainly didn’t.
The question is what you will do with the country you inherit.
I have been a college student wondering what my future would hold, a young man watching draft number 14 come up with my name attached to it, a bartender working nights to pay my way through college, an entrepreneur risking everything on an idea, an executive responsible for companies and the people who depended upon them, a husband and father, and eventually a grandfather looking at America very differently than I did when I was twenty.
I have succeeded, failed and started over. I have watched this country stumble, argue with itself, correct itself, reinvent itself and somehow keep moving forward…And after more than seven decades of watching America up close, I have not become cynical.
I have become grateful.
Because when I look backward across my life, I realize that America never promised me an easy road. It gave me something far more valuable. It gave me the freedom to choose my road. And now, as my generation moves toward the other end of that journey, I find myself thinking less about the America we inherited and much more about the America we will leave to you.
That is why I am writing this. Not to tell you everything is fine. Not to tell you my generation got everything right. And certainly not to tell you that you should see the world exactly as I do. I am writing because I want you to know something that seven decades of living have taught me: America is still worth believing in.
And soon, she will be yours.
For 73 years, I have lived through enough American history to know that every generation eventually believes it is living through the moment when everything is falling apart. I remember being young and wondering what kind of country I was going to inherit.
In 1972, I sat in front of a television and watched the Vietnam draft lottery. When my number was drawn, it was 14. That number changed everything.
The previous year’s draft had reached number 95, so with number 14, I had every reason to believe I would be drafted. I began going through the required processing including a pre-induction physical examination, preparing myself for what seemed inevitable.
At 19, most of your life seems to stretch endlessly in front of you. Suddenly, a number drawn from a container could determine where you would go, what you would do, and perhaps whether you would come home.
For nearly a year, that possibility hung over me…Then history changed.
On January 27, 1973, the Nixon administration announced that there would be no further draft calls and that America’s armed forces would transition to an all-volunteer military. Although the legal authority for my induction remained in effect until June 30, 1973, men in my 1953 birth cohort were ready but were never called.
Just like that, number 14 no longer determined my future.
But I never forgot what it felt like when it might. It was one of my earliest lessons in how quickly circumstances beyond our control can alter the direction of a life—and in the responsibilities that come with citizenship and the freedoms we sometimes take for granted.
A few years later, I was bartending nights and weekends in Balboa to put myself through college at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. During the day, I studied Political Science, Philosophy, Constitutional Law and International Relations. At night, I poured drinks. I thought I was learning about America in the classroom.
Looking back, I realize I was learning just as much behind that bar.
I met working people. Business owners. Dreamers. People who had succeeded and people who had failed. People who were starting over. They weren’t famous. Nobody was going to write books about them. They were simply Americans trying to build lives.
And over the next 45 years, I became one of them.
My career took me through professional sports, high-tech database development, direct marketing & fulfillment, waste heat energy recovery and securing 9 patents in DNA chemistry for molecular diagnostics.
There was no master plan connecting those things. There were ideas, opportunities and risks. There were successes and failures. And there were countless moments when someone looked at a problem and said: There has to be a better way. America allowed us to find out.
That may be the most important thing I want you to understand about the American Dream.
America never promised me success, it only gave me the freedom to try.
And the older I become, the more extraordinary that seems.
After September 11th, that freedom led me into energy technology. I helped build an energy company around the idea for capturing industrial waste heat and turning something being thrown away into useful electricity without emmissions.
An idea became technology, technology became a business and the business provided jobs. Eventually that technology went out into the world and today is deployed on 5 continents.
That experience convinced me that America’s greatest natural resource isn’t buried underground.
It is the imagination of free people.
But over the years I discovered something else. Freedom is not merely the ability to do whatever we want. Freedom requires something from us. Responsibility, character, work, self-reliance, family, community and the willingness to take care of something beyond ourselves.
I developed such affection for rural America growing up raising horses in southern California. Not because everyone should raise horses, become a farmer or move to a small town. And certainly not because wisdom belongs exclusively to people who live outside cities. It doesn’t. But there is something about rural life that preserves an old American lesson we would be foolish to forget.
When you work the land, repair your own fence, grow something, raise animals, run a small business or live in a community where your neighbors know your name, independence stops being an abstract political idea…It becomes a way of life. My conservative nature was born.
You learn things break – so you fix them.
Storms come – So you rebuild.
Someone gets sick – Neighbors show up to help.
A family struggles – People quietly help out.
There usually isn’t a government program involved. There isn’t a press conference. Nobody gets famous. People simply take care of oner another.
That America still exists. I have seen it. And I desperately hope your generation preserves it. Because somewhere along the way, we began confusing prosperity with consumption. We started measuring the American Dream by how much we could buy instead of how much we could build.
But the older American idea was deeper. Own something, build something, grow something, learn how something works, become good at something, take responsibility for something. Create a home, raise a family, help a neighbor, leave something behind. Those values aren’t rural or urban…They are human. And they may matter more to America’s future than almost anything happening in Washington. Because America is not Washington.
America is the farmer checking his fields before sunrise. It is the young couple sitting at a kitchen table figuring out how to buy their first home. It is the mechanic teaching an apprentice how to diagnose an engine. It is the nurse holding someone’s hand. It is the entrepreneur standing in a garage wondering whether an idea might actually work. It is the mother and father sacrificing quietly for children who may never fully understand how much was sacrificed for them. It is the neighbor who notices when the elderly woman down the street hasn’t brought in her garbage cans. It is the congregation feeding a family that has fallen on hard times. And it’s millions of Americans doing ordinary things with responsibility, decency and love.
That is America.
And that is why I remain optimistic. Not because everything is fine. It isn’t.
Your generation faces serious problems. Homes have become painfully expensive. Education can leave young people carrying enormous debt. Government has accumulated obligations that your generation will inherit. Technology is changing faster than society can absorb it. Institutions we once trusted sometimes disappoint us.
You should ask hard questions about all of it…I hope you do.
But don’t make the mistake of believing that because America has problems, the American idea has failed. America has always had problems. I know. I lived through many of them. The America of my youth wasn’t some idyllic place where everybody agreed and everything worked. We had assassinations. Riots. Vietnam. Watergate. Inflation. Gas shortages. The Cold War. And endless predictions that America was finished. Yet somehow Americans kept building. That is the part of our history I hope you remember.
Every generation receives an unfinished country.
Mine did…Yours does…The Founders themselves did.
And every generation eventually has to decide whether it will simply complain about what it inherited or accept responsibility for what comes next.
Now it is becoming your turn.
And when I look at young Americans, I don’t see the generation that will preside over America’s decline. I see people who haven’t yet discovered what they are capable of doing.
Some of you will start a company that doesn’t exist today.
Some of you will discover something that saves lives.
Many will become farmers to grow our food.
Many will build affordable homes for our families.
Many will become teachers, electricians, engineers, pilots, nurses, mechanics or scientists.
Many of you will raise children.
Many will care for aging parents.
Many will serve communities.
Some will create things my generation cannot even imagine.
And all of you will make mistakes…I certainly did.
You will fail at things you were certain would succeed. You will discover that life rarely follows the map you drew when you were twenty. And if you’re fortunate, eventually you will understand something that took me much of a lifetime to learn:
The American Dream was never the promise of an easy life.
It was the opportunity to build a meaningful one.
And meaning rarely comes from what we consume. It comes from what we create, whom we love, whom we serve, what we overcome and what we leave behind.
At 73, I think about that much more than I once did. Eventually life changes your perspective. You begin thinking less about what you can accumulate and more about what you are tending while it is temporarily in your care.
A family.
A business.
A piece of land.
A community.
A country.
And then one day you realize something: None of it was ever really yours forever. You were simply its caretaker.
My generation has been tending America for a while. We haven’t done everything right. There are things we need to repair before we hand it over. There are debts we should not have accumulated, institutions that need rebuilding and lessons we learned the hard way that we owe it to you to share. But there is also something magnificent still here.
Possibility.
The same possibility that existed when a young bartender drove from Balboa to Loyola Marymount wondering what he was going to do with his life. The same possibility that allowed an idea to become a business. The same possibility that allowed failure to become another beginning. The same possibility that has drawn generations of people toward this country believing tomorrow could be better than today. That possibility now belongs to you.
So build something.
Learn something.
Grow something.
Fix something.
Know how things work.
Know your neighbors.
Put down roots somewhere.
Love somebody.
Serve someone who cannot repay you.
Have faith.
Take responsibility.
Make mistakes.
Get back up.
And don’t spend your life waiting for somebody else to build the future you want.
Build it yourself.
I have been fortunate enough to spend more than seven decades in this remarkable, frustrating, imperfect and wonderful country. And if I could go back and sit beside that young man staring at draft number 14 on the television screen, I would put my hand on his shoulder and tell him:
You have no idea what is ahead of you.
There will be hard years.
There will be wonderful years.
There will be failures you think you will never recover from.
There will be opportunities you cannot yet imagine.
There will be people you love more than you knew it was possible to love.
Just keep going.
Keep learning.
Keep building.
Keep believing.
Because America will give you room to discover who you can become.
And now, from the other end of the road, I want to say exactly the same thing to you. You have no idea what is ahead of you.
Don’t let anyone convince you that America’s best chapters have already been written. They haven’t. Because you haven’t written yours yet.
Someday, if you are fortunate, you will stand where I stand today and look into the eyes of another generation preparing to inherit this country. When that day comes, I hope you can tell them: We took care of her, we repaired what needed repairing, we preserved what was worth preserving, we built things no one thought possible. We left you fields worth planting, communities worth belonging to, freedoms worth protecting and a country still filled with possibility.
Then hand America to them and tell them what my generation should be telling you right now: She’s yours now. Take good care of her. And whatever else happens along the way, never stop believing in what America—and you—can become.