A More Perfect Union

A Citizen’s Reflection on Music, Memory, and the Making of a Better America

I started as a musician.

Not a prodigy, not a star—just someone called to sound. To the slow unfolding of notes, the discipline of form, the joy of dialogue between voices. I made a living, for a time. Enough to stay afloat, pay rent, teach a few students, and carve out hours to compose.

But life doesn’t stay still. The costs began to add up. Not just financial, but human: family, health, a need for stability, for something more certain than the next gig. Music was never the problem. The world around it just stopped making room.

So I pivoted.

Wall Street, strategy, finance—worlds where outcomes were clear, language sharp, and success measurable. I learned the metrics. I mastered the models. I sat at long tables with serious people using serious acronyms: M&A, KPI, ROIC. And for a while, I believed in the game.

But the better I got at it, the more empty it became.

I watched the richest people I’d ever met live in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction. I watched excellence subordinated to optics. I watched people chase accumulation not because it made them whole—but because they didn’t know what else to pursue. The work never stopped. But the meaning rarely arrived.

And in the quiet moments, I heard the silence again. The one music fills.

So I came back.

Back to what was real. To sound. To structure. To silence that listened back.

Music doesn’t lie. It demands time, attention, honesty. And in a world that increasingly rewards shortcuts, it remains one of the few spaces where the long form still matters. Where discipline matters. You can’t fake it on the bandstand.

But what began as personal has become political. Because the emptiness I felt is not unique. It’s national. Cultural. Civilizational.

We are living through a collapse—not of power, but of meaning.

We are wealthier, louder, faster, more connected—and somehow more lost. We no longer agree on basic truths. We no longer reward wisdom. We confuse attention with significance. And we have allowed our public life to be consumed by performance, cruelty, and the triviality of spectacle.

We don’t just face a political crisis. We face a spiritual one.

And so I offer this—not as a policy platform or partisan plea—but as a proposal. A new architecture for the country we still might become. Not perfect. But whole. Not easy. But worth it.

A New Proposal for a Better America

I. Culture is not a luxury.

We must restore the arts to their rightful place: as essential, not ornamental. Every child should experience live music, real literature, and the visual arts—not as electives, but as foundations of civic life. Art is how a nation tells the truth about itself. It must be funded, defended, and lived.

II. Science is not opinion.

We must center evidence in our decisions—whether in climate, medicine, or public policy. That means reinvesting in basic research, protecting scientific institutions from political interference, and teaching the next generation not just facts, but how to think.

III. Education is the republic’s foundation.

We need to treat teachers as national assets, not political pawns. Pay them well. Equip them fully. Free them from test-driven obedience. Let schools be places of wonder again. A healthy democracy begins in a second-grade classroom, with a book, a song, and a teacher who believes.

IV. The law is a promise, not a bludgeon.

We must restore the rule of law—not just in form, but in spirit. That means equal justice. Voting rights. Ethical leadership. The law should be a covenant between citizens, not a tool of dominance for the powerful.

V. Work is not worship.

We must break the cult of burnout. Protect time for care, family, rest. Reward work that builds—not just profits, but communities. Let dignity, not hustle, define a good life.

VI. Character is policy.

We need leaders with inner lives. Leaders who read. Who reflect. Who know the weight of power and the limits of certainty. Public office should be a place of responsibility, not performance.

VII. This republic must be worthy of its dead.

Every flag on every coffin, every cross in every field, every name on every memorial is a question to us: What will you do with the freedom we bought for you? If our answer is cruelty, chaos, and narcissism—then the project is over. But if we answer with courage, humility, and renewal—then the work continues.

This is not nostalgia. This is memory, directed forward.

We’ve done it before. We’ve rebuilt. We’ve expanded the circle. We’ve faced worse, and found our better angels. But it won’t happen by default. It will take imagination. Restraint. Tenderness. And above all—seriousness.

We must become a serious people again.

Not somber—but grounded.

Not joyless—but purposeful.

Not performative—but present.

Because when this fever breaks—and it will—we will need something more than anger to carry us. We will need beauty. Order. Justice. Music. Memory. And a long, patient architecture of renewal.

We are not too far gone. But we are running out of time.

Let’s build something worthy. Of our ancestors. Of our children. Of our promise.

And when the silence comes again—not from defeat, but from listening—someone will begin the song.

And we will know how to answer.

Of course, I can already hear the cynics sharpening their smirks.

“Nice speech, McInerney. Beautiful writing. Noble, even. But be serious. This country’s finished. The divisions are permanent. The rot is too deep. The systems are rigged. You want justice? Join a nonprofit. You want meaning? Read Rilke. But don’t stand there and talk about art, science, law, and decency in a country that no longer wants them. We’re inside The Inferno, and the only smart move is to find your level and survive it.”

I’ve heard it before—from hedge funds and at happy hours, newsrooms and noise machines. The fatalism that masquerades as wisdom. The performance of knowing better. The conviction that caring is childish and that trying is quaint.

They call it realism.

But I call it what it is: surrender, dressed in sarcasm.

The truth is, cynicism is cheap. It costs nothing. It builds nothing. It protects no one.

What it does is absolve us—of responsibility, of imagination, of hope. It gives us permission to drift. And in that drift, the worst people rise. They always do. They thrive in the vacuum created by those who know better and do nothing.

So no—I won’t rejoin the chorus. I won’t speak in the cold fluency of KPIs and OKRs and quarterly wins divorced from human cost. I won’t pretend that skepticism is strength or that resignation is maturity.

Because here’s what I believe: if we are still capable of great harm, we are still capable of great repair.

If we are still capable of organizing cruelty, we are still capable of organizing compassion.

If we are still building weapons, we can still build bonds.

If we are still laughing, writing, mourning, singing—then there is something alive in us. Something that resists the flattening.

I am not blind to the darkness. I just refuse to mistake it for destiny.

What we do next matters. What we build next matters. Not for the markets or the headlines—but for the people who will wake up twenty years from now and ask, what did you stand for, when it all seemed lost?

That question is coming.

And when it does—I want my answer to be clear.

I stood for seriousness.

I stood for joy.

I stood for music.

I stood for memory.

I stood for the republic.

And I believed, against the trend, that we could still be good.

So let the cynics sneer. Let them trade poems for punchlines and hope for hashtags.

We will build anyway.

Because someone must.

And because the silence—beneath the noise—has not stopped calling us.

And so now comes the moment when words must become will.

We have diagnosed the rot. We have named the truth. We have imagined a better country.

Now we must build it.

Not next year. Not when it’s convenient. Not when it polls well. Now.

Because this moment—this divided, disfigured, distracted moment—will either be remembered as the point we gave up, or the point we began again.

We must do this.

For ourselves. For our children. For our children’s children.

We must remember the promise we made at our founding, when the Declaration of Independence declared:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal... endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights... among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

We must remember the charge written into the Preamble of our Constitution:

“To form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility... and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

We must remember the plea of Lincoln:

“It is for us the living... to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought... have thus far so nobly advanced... that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

We must remember FDR, who named the freedoms that still define a moral society:

“Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Freedom from want. Freedom from fear.”

We must remember JFK:

“Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”

And we must remember Dr. King:

“I have a dream... that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low... and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

That dream is not dead.

But it is waiting.

For us.

Not just to admire it. But to honor it.

Not just to repeat it. But to realize it.

We are the stewards now. Of the past and of the possible. And the world we pass on will bear the fingerprints of our courage—or our complacency.

So rise.

Rise with seriousness. Rise with joy. Rise with resolve that does not yield to cynicism or despair.

Let this be the moment we remembered who we were—and who we still could be.

Let this be the moment we began again.

In the future tense.