Suppose you carried the burden on your shoulders, not in a relaxed time of easy decisions, but right now.
Suppose you had my share of our joint responsibility to the world.
What would you do, my friends, you who applaud and you who condemn? How would you handle it?
Think about it.
Think about it!
He wanted them to know that it wasn't all that easy, and perhaps now they did, though he would not wager on their retaining the memory for very long....Infinite pains, infinite patience, infinite struggle and strain. Infinite labor that would have to go on for years, decades, possibily generations before it could be said that a truly stable peace had finally been achieved.
And that, perhaps, was the key to it: the unceasing struggle, the fugitive joy, the recurrent pain, the endless, mostly heartbreaking endeavor.
"'Let us,'" Lafe Smith had said, quoting on a dark and dismal night, "'wear upon our sleeves the crepe of mourning for a civilization that held the promise of joy.'"
The promise of joy.
Not the easy certainty.
Not the painless assurance.
Not the comfortable guarantee.
Just--the promise.
That, perhaps, was all that the American experiment, all that any experiment in human governance that sprang from essentially decent motives, could hold out--the promise of joy. A promise always elusive, always fleeting, never quite captured, never quite achieved, here today, gone tomorrow, back again next day--if you kept working and hoping and struggling and, above all, if you never gave up. If you hung on and kept trying, all of you, unto the last generation.
If his successors--for successors he still believed there would be--were strong, were determined, never lost sight of the essential goodness of the American experiment and the essential goodness of all other sincere and well-meaning peoples wherever they might reside on troubled Earth--then there just possibly, somewhere far off beyond his lifetime and maybe far off beyond many other subsequent lifetimes, the promise of joy might sometime--somehow--someday--be kept for his country and for all mankind.
But more likely that was all it was, or could ever be: a promise.
A promise forever worth the seeking--but only a promise.
All ye of faint heart and wavering will who seek the certainty of joy, he told them quietly in his mind, forget it.
It does not exist.

~Allen Drury, Promise of Joy