The Foundation Always Shows

We don’t pay enough attention to foundations.

A foundation isn’t flashy. Nobody brags about the concrete slab under their million-dollar home. They brag about the granite countertops, the open floor plan, the infinity pool. But the house only stands because of what you don’t see. If the foundation crumbles, everything else follows. 

The same is true for people. Childhood is only a sliver of your life on paper, but it frames the rest of the story. For better or worse, the foundation you start with shapes the walls you build, the doors you can open, and the ceilings you’ll bump against. We all live in the echoes of those early blueprints.

Cycles And if that’s true for individuals, it’s even truer for nations.

Cycles of lack.

Cycles of playing small. America’s foundation wasn’t justice, equality, or freedom. Those are the shiny granite countertops we were sold. The actual foundation was laid in slavery, exploitation, and profit above people. Whole fortunes were built on stolen land, stolen bodies, stolen credit for work never done by the ones reaping the benefit.

That’s the concrete slab. Everything else is just the remodel.

So when we scratch our heads about why we can’t seem to solve gun violence, or why a cure for cancer never “quite makes it to market,” or why poverty still cycles generation after generation, it’s not that we lack solutions. It’s that the foundation resists them. Because solutions that put people first would shake the very ground this country was built on: greed and gains by any means.

That’s the ugly truth about foundations: you can decorate, renovate, paint over, and distract with shiny things. But if the ground under you was poured wrong, you’ll always feel the cracks creeping in.

And until we’re honest about what this country was built on, nothing we build on top of it will ever truly stand.