A day or two following President Barack Obama’s inaugural address in 2009, I was observing a classroom where his message was being reviewed. The students took turns reading aloud, and they were highly engaged and enthusiastic about the speech. Three times, they stumbled over the word “prosperity,” and, after the third instance of the word in that speech, the teacher asked if “prosperity” would be desirable. The students said, “Yes!” When the teacher asked why, the students said that If President Obama said it, it must be good! Did they know what prosperity was? No one could define it. Did they still want it? Decidedly, yes.
Do students need to know the word “prosper” or any form of it? What image do the students have of the well-being of our nation?
When the founding fathers transmitted the Constitution to George Washington, they linked the prosperity of our nation to the States’ ability to form a union. That makes it important. Here is a link to the Transmittal Letter. The founding fathers’ message about a prosperous nation has been reiterated, in fact, by most Presidents in their State of the Union addresses or other first messages to Congress. It seems to be pretty important—even beyond the bling and the bank account. Even beyond fixing our financial institutions.
The archive of Presidential messages at The American Presidency Project (University of California, Santa Barbara), allows us to discover that, nearly all Presidents before Woodrow Wilson in his second term made specific and frequent reference to prosperity in each of their first messages to the American people. President Abraham Lincoln mentioned it in all of his years. The early exceptions, included James Garfield and William Henry Harrison, who did not give messages, and Thomas Jefferson, who probably would have found it incongruous, given his confrontation with a massive medical contagion, an outbreak of piracy, and border disputes with Spain over the Louisiana territory. On the bright side, for Jefferson, American captives had recently been released and rescued from Tripoli. That native Americans were surrendering their prosperous lands for money is probably a subject for another day. In his first term, Jefferson had advocated citizenship for immigrants so as not to deny them access to the prosperity and asylum enjoyed by the first arrivals on American shores. In the modern time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt carried it forward during 3 out of 4, changing his focus only in 1941; Lyndon Baines Johnson eschewed it in 1964, understandable given the tragic circumstances of his ascent; and Richard M. Nixon skipped it in 1974 while Jimmy Carter neglected it in his only term. By contrast, Harry S. Truman held the quantity record, referencing prosperity 10 and 12 times in 1946 and 1949, respectively.
How can we help our students form a connection to this history so that they can make good decisions about leadership and law? Can the arts help?
If we search for children’s drawings of prosperity, very little rises to the top in the way of children’s drawings. By contrast, children’s drawings of war, trauma, homelessness, and peace abound on the Internet. Since the late nineteenth century, children’s drawing has been used, with somewhat mixed results, to study their psychology and pathology. See Knowledge in the Making.
Perhaps drawing can also assist in creating a sense of well-being. Do you have an abundance mentality, or do you lean toward fear of scarcity? What will our students see when they look at the world? Can their drawings convey meaning that their limited vocabularies cannot?
At least one performing artist, Leonard Nimoy, thought seriously about the meaning of prosperity in creating his Vulcan character. ”Live long and prosper,” said Mr. Spock. True fans will tell you that the appropriate reply is “Peace and long life.” Spring is a good season for a renewal of peace and prosperity. Your well-being may depend upon it.
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