I shared my daughter Mallory’s blog earlier - so many
resonating thoughts echoing around in my head and heart these past days…
Let
America be America again.
Let
it be the dream it used to be.
Let
it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking
a home where he himself is free.
(America
never was America to me.)
Foremost among them the notion shared with my daughter that
I will neither mourn nor live in fear as a result of the election now
culminated in the recent inauguration. I
simply cannot, life is too short. And
saying this, I in no way diminish very legitimate concerns, even fears of good
friends, friends I spoke to the day after the election and again on Friday who
are lesbian, trans, or otherwise marginalized…
O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been
yet--
And yet must be--the land where
every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor
man's, Indian's, Negro's,
ME--
But my daughter also spoke about seeing the worst in
America. I don’t – and I do see these
things. I don’t see them as a uniquely
American problem. Americans may – to me
that is the problem with some of the interpretations of American Exceptionalism
– they are borne out of willful ignorance.
Yet I'm the one who dreamt our
basic dream
In the Old World while still a
serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so
brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring
sings
In every brick and stone, in
every furrow turned
That's made America the land it
has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those
early seas
In search of what I meant to be my
home--
For I'm the one who left dark
Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's
grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's
strand I came
To build a "homeland of the
free."
I’m a strange brew perhaps.
I write this sitting in a business class seat flying to work in eastern
Europe. When I look around the airport
lounge in which I find momentary peace while waiting to board the next flight
to somewhere, I see white privilege demonstrated perfectly. I’m both at ease and yet uncomfortable with it. My early years were on a farm and we didn’t
have much – I miss some of that, but I still know what it means to have enough. I’m Australian, soon hopefully do hold dual
citizenship, but I’ve been fortunate to have traveled to work on every
continent, visiting some of the world’s greatest cities, and some of the poorer
villages. We’ve probably messed our
children up along the way and that’s OK - the older one in particular has a
gypsy spirit like mine and has already traveled extensively on her own. Maybe this gives me the luxury of seeing
things a little differently… maybe it explains her perspective.
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose
faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose
plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream
again.
A couple of days ago I went back to a piece by Harry Belafonte
published in the NY Times the eve of the election. It worked around themes in a well-known (and
yet maybe not) poem by Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again”. If you’re wondering where some of the
verse strewn through this was from, wonder no more. Belafonte contrasts the America that was at
the time Hughes, a gay black man, wrote this poem in the 1930’s and now. And he recognizes that the hard fought gains in
basic rights and equality won for so many are both a huge step forward, but yet
still there is much to be done. For the
truth is that the dreams laid out in the American Constitution are just that. As President Obama pointed out in his
farewell address, they are not self-executing.
They as history has proven require a lot of work to make the dream into
a reality, but more importantly, they are also I would add, not self-sustaining.
Let America be the dream the
dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land
of love
Where never kings connive nor
tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one
above.
(It never was America to me.)
Maybe here is a subtle difference between my perspective and
that of my daughter. Belafonte refers
often to what “old men know”. I’ll grant
him at 90 this to be wisdom… for me at 50ish, I’ll call it experience. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, an adoptee of the
American experiment like myself, but without the advantages in this country of
being white or male, wrote shortly after the election:
America has always been aspirational
to me. Even when I chafed at its hypocrisies,
it somehow always seemed sure, a nation that knew what it was doing,
refreshingly free of that anything-can-happen existential uncertainty so
familiar to developing nations.”
I think my daughter struggles with those hypocrisies. Maybe I have enough experience to know we
will always struggle with them… but struggle we must. I wrote to a group of people the day after
the election
From a cold and rainy New York, a new day has dawned... As I drove for four hours along the lakes
from Cleveland to Rochester to get here in time for breakfast with my daughter
and the team, it occurred to me that contrary to some of the commentary on the
radio, we are not waking up to a different America - it is pretty much what it
is - an amazing experiment that keeps evolving.
A giant American flag flying in breezy early morning light just off the
interstate near Erie looked pretty much as sure of itself as ever.
Here's the thing… whatever the reasons people voted for
President Trump, and I don’t believe as some of my friends that this automatically
makes them bad people… whatever their reasons and motivations, those people
were here when Obama was elected in 2008 and again in 2012. Some of them voted for Obama!!! Their motivations may have changed, but what
I worry about is not that they are not in pursuit of the great American Dream,
but that they think it was in the past. That
is the core of Trump’s message “Make America Great Again”- a corruption perhaps
of Langston’s poem?
Out of the rack and ruin of our
gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and
stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants,
the rivers.
The mountains and the endless
plain--
All, all the stretch of these
great green states--
And make America again!
I’m not down on America.
You don’t have to be perfect or great to do great things, you just have
to decide to do what appears to be right and then act. Hopefully you get it right some, maybe most
of the time. America not in isolation
has a proud history of doing great things.
But I don’t want to go back to the past either. There are better things ahead… Winning voting
rights for all, ending Jim Crow, achieving full rights for women, and letting
people of all genders and sexual orientations stand in the light as equals, all
pointed out by Belafonte are not done deals, not even close. These things are for now enshrined in our law
(more or less), but not necessarily enshrined in how we live. There is a huge difference here and one I
found many people here in the USA who questioned my going to South Africa for a
project just after Mandela was released but before the full transition from
apartheid could not grasp – apartheid (oh of course we never called it that)
was no longer legal in the United States in 1990, but that didn’t mean it was
not still happening.
I am the poor white, fooled and
pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's
scars.
I am the red man driven from the
land,
I am the immigrant clutching the
hope I seek--
And finding only the same old
stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush
the weak.
I like President Obama’s explanation of American
exceptionalism, not that is is necessarily unique.
So that's what we mean when we say America is exceptional. Not that our
nation has been flawless from the start, but that we have shown the capacity to
change, and make life better for those who follow.
So I will not… We
cannot sit idly by and not only watch these hard fought gains recede, in fact
we must stand and be willing to fight if necessary not just to preserve what
has been won, but to advance it. And “We” to me as I study American civics in
preparation to adopt citizenship of this country is incredibly important, and
the reason I will neither mourn nor live in fear. Citizenship comes with benefits and
responsibilities. And if “We the people” matters a damn, then the
“certain unalienable Rights” spoken of in the Declaration of Independence and
spelled out in the Constitution are still worth fighting for. I didn’t finish this on the flight but in a
lounge in Munich airport where I “awoke” to incredible pictures of assemblies
not only in the United States, but all over the world where people stood up and
said just this. It warmed my soul and
was both tremendously encouraging and inspiring. President Trump was correct in his inaugural
speech to say “What truly matters is not which party controls our government,
but whether our government is controlled by the people.” There is work to be done…
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
You can find most of my references at the following links:
