What can be retained, is, sometimes, a question that allows for course correction. What do we keep in things generally agreed on to be a mess?
In America, there are great things that need to be phrased in a different way to be understood and kept; and words that are no longer useful.
Lateral space is one of the great positives of our land, physically and metaphorically. Our ability to traverse it is sometimes something we sometimes call “Liberty,” as if the primary issue at hand were something constraining us. The primary issue is a love of lateral motion, velocity, capability and not being transfixed by the vertical.
“Potentiality” would be a better term, but breadth and distance are the real positives, to look at and step into a far off particular.
The compressed focus of the horizontality does not extinguish the vertical. In fact it implies it.