"We emphasize that we believe in change because we were born of it, we have lived by it, we prospered and grew great by it. So the status quo has never been our god, and we ask no one else to bow down before it"
About this Quote
Change isn’t pitched here as a fashionable slogan; Rowan frames it as an American birthright with receipts. The sentence builds like a civic sermon, stacking clauses that move from origin (“born of it”) to survival (“lived by it”) to triumph (“prospered and grew great by it”). That escalation matters: it turns change from a risky gamble into the country’s proven operating system. By the time he lands on “status quo,” it’s not a neutral condition but a rival deity, something people are asked to worship without admitting it.
Rowan’s intent is corrective and political. As a journalist who came of age through segregation, Cold War anxiety, and the convulsions of the civil rights era, he’s addressing the reflexive nostalgia that always shows up when power feels threatened. The subtext is blunt: calls for “order” and “stability” are often coded defenses of existing hierarchies. When he says “we ask no one else to bow down before it,” he’s not pleading for tolerance; he’s rejecting moral submission to arrangements that flatter the comfortable.
The rhetoric is doing double duty. It’s patriotic language aimed at people who think reform is un-American, and it’s a warning to progressives who forget that backlash is not a glitch but part of the cycle. Rowan turns “change” from a partisan demand into a national self-description, then weaponizes that description against complacency. If America’s greatness is inseparable from upheaval, the status quo stops being safety and starts looking like idolatry.
Rowan’s intent is corrective and political. As a journalist who came of age through segregation, Cold War anxiety, and the convulsions of the civil rights era, he’s addressing the reflexive nostalgia that always shows up when power feels threatened. The subtext is blunt: calls for “order” and “stability” are often coded defenses of existing hierarchies. When he says “we ask no one else to bow down before it,” he’s not pleading for tolerance; he’s rejecting moral submission to arrangements that flatter the comfortable.
The rhetoric is doing double duty. It’s patriotic language aimed at people who think reform is un-American, and it’s a warning to progressives who forget that backlash is not a glitch but part of the cycle. Rowan turns “change” from a partisan demand into a national self-description, then weaponizes that description against complacency. If America’s greatness is inseparable from upheaval, the status quo stops being safety and starts looking like idolatry.
Quote Details
| Topic | Embrace Change |
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