“MOYERS: What’s the moral assignment now?
DAVIS: Well, I don’t know.
And I suspect a lot of us don’t know, but it’s up to us to recognize that there is one and that we need access to it, and we need to align all our small objectives, in line with the moral assignment of the times and of the age.
There is a saying in the book, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Right now, we are sort of short on the vision thing, as some politicians have mentioned.
MOYERS: Some of my audience is young enough to know what the book is.
DAVIS: The book is the Bible. A lot of us depended on that, Bill. There are those of us committed to destiny or biology or whatever, to concern ourselves with the moral assignment.
We communicators, we storytellers, we poets, we artists, what is our function really but to remind ourselves that in the human endeavor, our humanity is never complete unless it has a strong moral component.
And we cannot afford to be too small in our objectives because what is required even to survive is that we take the larger view of ourselves and our possibilities.
And somebody has got to say that, somebody’s got to ring that bell, somebody’s got to write that poem, sing that song, dance that dance that says to us all, “Rise, you’re larger than that. It’s up to you to define the final meaning of America.” We’re not there yet, but we’re on the way.” (Source)