Ken Burns

And that's important.

You know, a narrative that's sort of challenged by whatever pain, whatever unresolved traumas are existing.

So if we collectively as a country are suffering from some sense of dislocation and sort of feeling like we're disunited...

Learning the origin story could remind us a lot of those things.

And to sort of say that you could go back to people talk about heritage and blood.

Well, if you're really going to apply that accurately to the United States at the time of the founding, then that's Native American.

But other than that, we are an incredibly – there's a huge variety of people.

There's Americans and there's people that speak Dutch and there's people that are speaking German.

There are French people.

There are Native Americans living within us.

There are imported –

kidnapped Africans, enslaved and free, who speak and have inherited various religions, but also languages from mostly West and Central Africa.

There are those native nations with their tongues and varieties of religious and spiritual practices and linguistic differences that make it all a kind of complex Tower of Babel.

And it's only our desire to simplify things, to get back to that gated community where everything runs smoothly,

That we want to limit it to just one type of person.

You can't do that with the founding of the United States.

And I think our film is an attempt to sort of remind people how, I don't take the description adverb, it's deliciously complicated.

I hope so.

I think cynicism is a luxury for jaded journalists and jet setters.

I'm neither.