Mount Rushmore Musings Part 2

This is the second of a five-part blog series. This summer we visited Mount Rushmore and it was an inspiring experience.  If you missed the first one you can review it here.  

The artist who created Mount Rushmore, Gutzon Borglum, chose the individuals in the monument because of the impact each of them had on the United States, which also impacted the world.  George Washington was chosen because he represented the birth of the United States.

“The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” ~ George Washington 1789

While I am sharing my inspirations and musings from this trip I encourage you to check in what your inspirations may be.

While history can remind us of many challenging things, I am choosing in this series to focus on the positive.  

So how are we doing with this experiment entrusted to our hands?  It’s truly difficult to think back and understand what it took to birth a new country.  What amount of vision and fortitude is required to begin the process of developing a way for people to live together such that they can prosper in a free manner?  Have we been successful?  

Washington’s belief was that the sacred fire of liberty burned in each of us, it was called our conscience. This is the thing that would guide us about rightness and wrongness. 

The question today is…

What is informing conscience?
What is determining rightness and wrongness?

In my last blog, we talked about the lack of a guiding vision, a time of individualism to such a degree that we are no longer clear about who we are as a people and what we exist for.  In our line of work, we see it in the lack of clarity when we ask the question “What is the money for?”

Once you can keep the lights on then it’s more about comfort.  From there typically it’s a desire for life experiences and after that, it starts to get really hazy for most people. 

Legacy planning is a concept we work on with our clients. 

How many generations into the future can you imagine having an impact on? How would the experiment turn out differently if each of us began to think in a picture that was much bigger than just me and just now?

The musings will continue with Thomas Jefferson in our next blog 😊