Land of Milk & Honey (Keep the Promise)
They play “America the Beautiful” on the corner by the grocery—three buskers with a dented trumpet, a snare, and a bass that’s seen more winters than hope. Behind them, a billboard-sized flag ripples like a promise you can’t quite cash.
Hank—retired trucker, bad knees, good back until it wasn’t—leans into the dumpster with Mabel, a former nurse who can still thread an IV by touch. They aren’t looking for gourmet; they’re looking for calories. A cracked milk carton drips. A honey packet sticks to Mabel’s glove. She laughs once, a dry sound. “Land of milk and honey,” she says. “We got the labels right.”
If you asked Hank what he gave this country, he’d answer without poetry: four million miles of freight and a lifetime of FICA clipped from every paycheck. He hauled drywall for schools and grain for bread and Halloween candy for kids he’d never meet. When bridges shuddered under his rig, he remembered the crews who poured the concrete in August heat—and the taxes they paid, same as him. He didn’t mind. That was the deal: you pay forward so no one starves backward.
Enter the black hearts.
They don’t wear capes; they wear conference lanyards. They speak fluent spreadsheet. To them, people are columns: Labor, Aging, Cost. They never say “grandma”; they say “entitlement growth.” They call promises “liabilities,” and dignity “moral hazard.” They stand at podiums with graphs that slope like cliffs and tell the old to be realistic: The milk has to be watered down. The honey is discretionary.
“We can’t afford it,” they say, as if the country that built interstates and split atoms can’t afford to keep its word to the very hands that built and steered and stitched and taught.
At the VFW hall, someone tacks up pay stubs like relics: little teeth marks of FICA on every month from 1979 to 2020. Mabel pins hers beside Hank’s—years she worked nights so a stranger’s kid would have a mother in the morning. A retired lineman adds his, callused thumbs smoothing the paper. A teacher. A janitor. A farmhand with a back like a busted fence but a smile like sunrise. The wall becomes a quilt of proof: we prepaid.
The black hearts arrive with a slide deck.
“Unfunded obligations,” they say.
“Unfunded?” Rosa—the teacher—steps forward. “We funded it the hard way. With time.”
They blink, confused that anyone answers in human.
Rosa holds up a honey packet and a grocery receipt. “You call this a benefit. I call it a receipt for decades of labor. You don’t get to tear it up because your spreadsheet caught a chill.”
The buskers outside keep playing. The trumpet stumbles on from sea to shining sea, then finds the note again. Inside, someone starts humming along. Not triumph—stubbornness.
The black hearts switch tactics. “Personal responsibility,” they say. “Private charity.” “Family should step up.” As if families aren’t already tapped out. As if church pantries run on magic. As if a son working two jobs can morph into a pension.
Hank feels the old anger crawl up his spine, the kind that kept him awake through a white-out in Wyoming and a brake fire on Donner. He isn’t asking for confetti or fireworks. He’s asking for the floor that was promised: a warm room, a filled prescription, a grocery cart that doesn’t require bargaining with dignity.
He lifts one of the pay stubs from the wall and reads the line aloud like scripture: F.I.C.A. A little tax, every time, all the time. A vow etched in ink.
“Here’s the deal,” Hank says, voice steady. “You don’t get to call it ‘charity’ on the way out when you called it ‘contribution’ on the way in.”
Silence. Then the snare drum outside rattles a march. The room breathes.
The black hearts shuffle papers. They promise to “study the matter.” They always do. They talk about “hard choices,” by which they mean your hard choices: skip the heat, split the pills, borrow from the kids. They pack up their graphs and leave before the end of the song.
Hank and Mabel walk out into the evening. The flag billows. The trumpet holds the final note just a second longer than expected, a thin thread stretched between what the country sings and what it does. Mabel tears open the honey packet and drizzles it over a bruised apple they found. They split it, clean down the middle.
“Sweet enough,” she says.
“Not the point,” Hank answers.
Across the street a new banner hangs in a storefront window. No logo, no party, no politician—just big block letters:
KEEP THE PROMISE.
People stop to read it. Some nod. Some wipe their eyes. A kid asks what it means, and his father says, “It means we don’t let the folks who built this place eat out of a dumpster.”
The buskers start the hymn again, slower this time, like a vow instead of a victory lap. And for a moment the distance between the song and the sidewalk narrows to something you can step across.
The black hearts will be back. They always come back with new numbers and the same emptiness. But the wall of pay stubs is still there, and the banner is still lit, and a town that remembers what was earned is a harder town to cheat.
America, the beautiful, isn’t a chorus. It’s a covenant.
And a covenant, once given, should be kept.
