Last night my family and I watched Hamilton (on Disney Plus). One of the lines struck me in a new way: “America, you great unfinished symphony.”

I am not a composer, but I have tried writing music. It is in fact, the most difficult thing I have ever tried to do. Composing music requires facing up to your mistakes, to the notes that don’t sound good together and to the rhythms that don’t make any sense. It requires being brutally honest with yourself about what you’ve done well and what you’ve done badly. It requires painstakingly writing and rewriting chords until you find ones that fit together harmoniously. All of that is required, even if you are only going to write twelve bars of music for one instrument.

Now a symphony ? That’s a great feat for a composer and something they will not even attempt until they’ve successfully written in every other medium. Writing a symphony requires using every instrument of the orchestra to its very best. It requires understanding and using harmony so well that you can make a hundred people sound good together. It requires making those hundred people sound good together for thirty to forty minutes, which means writing thousands of measures of music.

Now Lin Manuel Miranda is a genius for tons of reasons, but this line: “America, you great unfinished symphony” is a truly incredible line because with that one phrase he is telling us what we need to do.

What do you do with an unfinished symphony ?

You finish it.

And how do you finish it?

You finish a symphony by finding every mistake in the thousands of measures, and painstakingly correcting each one. You finish a symphony by giving a beautiful part to each instrument, to every single person. You finish a symphony by finding a way for a hundred people to make something beautiful together. You finish a symphony through discipline, through hard work, through sweat and tears and crumpled up manuscript paper.

To finish the great unfinished symphony of America, we have a lot of mistakes to fix. We have a lot of parts to give more attention to. Anti racism education is the beginning of fixing this great unfinished symphony. We cannot have a beautiful symphony, if we are neglecting and hurting an entire section of the orchestra.

When the Black Lives Matter protests started this year, I was afraid. I was afraid of war. I have clinical anxiety and it is easy for conflicts to become national wars in my mind. I abhorred violence of all kinds, but I wasn’t properly understanding that these protests have come from lifetimes of mistreatment in America. The violence I should have abhorred the most was police violence. No one should ever feel unsafe in the presence of those that are supposed to protect. I made a mistake that I’ve been thinking about everyday.

I made the mistake of not expressing clearly and soundly that Black Lives Matter. In the words of a recent popular protest sign, “matter is the minimum”. I have a lot of work to do and a lot of mistakes to correct. But I’m willing to do that, so we can have a more beautiful symphony in which every person has a beautiful part that we listen to.

Symphonies don’t get finished without editing, and neither will we.

Our nation’s symphony will be difficult to finish, but it will be a work of art when it’s done.

We’ve got a lot of work to do. Let’s sit together at the piano and fix all these wrong notes.