Americans are going to be “alright”, actor Tom Hanks said, albeit without a mention of Donald Trump’s victory as the US President.
Hanks, at an event at the Museum of Modern Art’s film department on Tuesday night, spoke of the despair many in the entertainment industry feel about Trump’s election as president, reports variety.com.
While he never mentioned Trump by name, Hanks said: “We are going to be all right. America has been in worse places than we are at right now. In my own lifetime, our streets were in chaos, our generations were fighting each other tooth and nail and every dinner table ended up being as close to a fist fight as human families will allow.
“We have been in a place where we have looked at our leaders and wondered what the hell they were thinking of. We’ve had moments with the administrations and politicians and senators and governors in which we have asked ourselves ‘Are they lying to us or do they really believe in this?’ That’s all right.
“We have this magnificent thing that is in place. It’s a magnificent document and it starts off with these phrases that if you’re smart enough you’ve memorized in school or you just read enough to that you know it by heart, or you watched those little things on ABC where they taught you a little songs in order to sing. and the song goes (singing): ‘We the people/in order to form a more perfect union/established to ensure domestic tranquility/to provide for the common defense/promote the general welfare,’ and you go on and on. That document is going to protect us over and over again whether or not our neighbours preserve, protect and defend it themselves.
“We are going to be all right because we constantly get to tell the world who we are. We constantly get to define ourselves as Americans. We do have the greatest country in the world. We move at a slow pace. We have the greatest country in the world because we are always moving towards a more perfect union.
“That journey never ceases, it never stops. Sometimes, to quote a Bruce Springsteen song, it’s one step forward two steps back, but we still aggregately move forward. We who are a week into wondering what the hell just happened will continue to move forward. We have to choose to do so, but we will move forward because if we do not move forward. What is to be said of us?
‘We will take everything that has been handed to us as Americans and we will turn our nation and we will turn the future and we will turn all the work that we have in before us into some grand thing of beauty,” Hanks said in his monologue.