In moment of exasperation,
I shot off this text to a couple of friends of mine last Friday:
So let’s recap.
It’s ‘America First’ except:
Democrats, poor people, people
without health insurance, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, victims of police
violence, victims of gun violence, immigrants from Mexico, immigrants from
Central America, immigrants from majority Muslim nations (except Saudi Arabia),
Cabinet members who refuse to perjure themselves, Republicans who vote their
conscience, non-gender conforming
military personnel, anyone who is LGBT, journalists from any news outlet
(except FOX News), the Boy scouts, and/or anyone who has a differing opinion of
any kind.
My goodness! With a long (growing)
list like that, who is going to be left to put ‘first?’
This move was
actually not very like me.
As someone who
does not use Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram or Twitter, it is quite rare that my
impulsivity and emotional mind goes
public.
But to be fair to
myself, this question of: What is
America?, is one that I have been asking myself since January of this year.
January 21st to be
exact. 
Because that was the day America Ferrera, the American actress and activist of Honduran immigrant parents said this at the Women’s March in Washington D.C. the day after the 2017 Presidential Inauguration:
It’s been a heart-wrenching time to be a woman and an immigrant in this country ― a platform of hate and division assumed power yesterday. But the president is not America. ...We are America.
In past blog posts I have written about the idea, albeit
idealistic at best, of a spiritual democracy in which we the people are not “merely”
striving for a legal democracy, but rather a spiritual democracy
in which we aspire for a just democracy (which means legal + moral) that is a wholehearted “we”
rather than a democracy that is solely an “I.”
Contemplating this utopian democracy
of my dreams, I have to wonder, outside of the political circuit, what
phrases like: “America first” and “We are America” would manifest to be in
day-to-day life.
And I’m not the only one who is contemplating this.
Just one month after Ms. Ferrera made her bold statement to
a crowd of hundreds of thousands of Americans, I read this by another American,
the Iranian-American author, religious studies scholar, and star of CNN’s Believer
Reza Aslan, in Vanity
Fair.com
We are in the midst of a crisis of
identity in which we are trying to figure out who we are as a
nation...[Americans]who feel as though their privileged position in society had
been shaken are reacting to the natural progress of human society.
There is that “we” again. And he went on to imply that this “crisis of identity,” if worked through effectively, is not in-and-of itself a problem. In fact, he said:
It creates more fertile ground for
larger conversations about American identity…Instead of dealing with these
issues on an issue-by-issue basis, I think it’s easier now to draw larger
conclusions.
I like that Mr.
Aslan uses this word “identity” when referring to our nation.
More often than
not, “identity” is a word to describe the self (the individual), but what if
the self, the individual, is also a collective we? In the creation of identity, how does the “I”
influence the “we” and how does the “we” influence the “I”?
I was thinking
about these questions recently while I was reading Buddhist teacher, author and
activist Thich Nhat Hanh’s 1988 book
The
Sun My Heart: From Mindfulness to Insight Contemplation.
In the book he
said:
Meditators realize that all
phenomena interpenetrate and inter-are with all other phenomena, so in their
everyday lives they look at a chair or an orange differently from most people.
When they look at mountains and rivers, they see that ‘rivers are no longer
rivers and mountains are no longer mountains.’ Mountains ‘have entered’ rivers,
and rivers ‘have entered’ mountains (interpenetration). Mountains become
rivers, and rivers become mountains (interbeing). However, when they want to go
for a swim, they have to go into the river and not climb the mountain. When
they return to everyday life, ‘mountains are again mountains, rivers are again
rivers.
This excerpt made
me wonder, in a world of interpenetration, inter-are and interbeing, where
would the lines be drawn between a national
identity versus a personal identity?
Even for a neophyte
like me, it’s hard to have these types of conversations and not think about
ideas and philosophies like Existentialism, which, after
researching on the internet for several days now, I’ve come to understand as the
choice of an individual to freely give meaning to life and live authentically.
But what if it is not the individual who is in a “existential dilemma” in which s/he feels a state of confusion, disorientation and
lack of clarity of their own personal priorities and values, but rather an entire nation?
And is it even possible to ever completely separate the two?
(Again, Thich Nhat Hanh’s “the mountain and the river…”)
And what if, to complicate this even further, we happen to
be living in a time when, unlike the cultural revolution of the 1960’s,individuals
not only do not feel confusion, disorientation and lack of clarity of
their own personal priorities and values, but rather extreme certainty? Where it feels like we are trying to form an
Organizational Vision among board members who’s shared reality of total disagreement in opinions is the only
thing that can be agreed upon.
Therein lies the problem of effectively working through a national existential dilemma: the
individuals and groups that make up the national
whole do not feel confused and
disoriented, and therefore refuse (or out-right deny) to productively address
the problem.
In other words, if I am
the “mountain,” I still must work through and with the part of me that is the "river.” All of us must. Otherwise, I don’t know what.
It sounds weird, but during these times of national
existential crisis, when I am contemplating my feelings of powerlessness as a
teeny-tiny part of the collective “we,” I find it helpful to re-watch historical
movies (I’m a visual person) that dramatically depict this national tension.
The time period I look to most is the abolition of slavery.
Through films like Amistad, Amazing Grace and Lincoln,
I am able to retrace poignant moments in our history that to me represent periods
that we were able to (painfully) move through a national (or global)
existential dilemma to reach a new plateau of consciousness.
Probably in some ways it is also to soothe my own anxiety
because, as historical pieces, I know how it all will turn out.
But also, it helps me to hold perspective and a measured hope that we will get through
this period of democratic growing pains
as well- even if I still catastrophize about fascism taking over each time I
turn on the news.
In an interview
with NPR in spring of this year, Bono, the activist, philanthropist and Irish lead singer and lyricist of the rock
band U2, reiterated his own take on
the question: What is America? that I
have always been drawn to.
He said:
There's two Americas: There's the
mythic America and the real America. We were obsessed by America at the time.
America's a sort of promised-land for Irish people — and then, a sort of
potentially broken promised land.
If the Declaration of Independence
is like the liner notes of America, we're like annoying fans that follow
politicians into the bathroom and say, ‘But it says here, 'We pledge our sacred
honor.' What's that about?’ And people suffer us talking about America because
we love it so much. Rather arrogantly, we don't think you own it. We think
America is an idea that belongs to people who need it most.
On July 4th of this year, our nation’s 241st birthday, PBS wrote a piece called “Who is America?” It began with this introduction:
In his 1796 farewell address, George Washington described
his countrymen as ‘citizens, by birth or choice.’ At the time, the nation had
roughly 4 million people, including women and slaves…The United States’
population now stands at 325 million. Amid new questions of American identity,
this July Fourth seemed like a good idea to look at who exactly makes up
America, whether by birth or choice. And how it is forecast to change.
Citizens, by birth or choice.
So, then what is America? Who is America? Is it a
people? An idea? A geographic area (that is a whole other blog post for
another day!)? And if we don’t know or can’t agree, how can we possibly make
meaning of our collective lives and live together authentically?
For myself, in
order to arrive at my own complicated truth, I again, turn to the wisdom
Thich Nhat Hanh who says in his chapter “Neither Form Nor Emptiness” in The Sun My Heart: From Mindfulness to
Insight Contemplation:
The notion of inter-origination (paratantra) is very close to living
reality. It annihilates dualistic concepts, one/many, inside/outside,
time/space, mind/matter, and so forth, which the mind uses to confine, divide,
and shape reality. The notion of inter-origination can be used not only to
destroy habits of cutting up reality, but also to bring about a direct
experience of reality. As a tool, however, it should not be considered a form
of reality in itself.
Paratantra is the very nature of living reality, the absence of an
essential self. Just as a triangle exists only because three lines intersect
each other, you cannot say any thing exists in itself. Because they have no
independent identity, all phenomena are described as empty (sunya). This does not mean that phenomena
are absent, only that they are empty of an essential self, of a permanent
identity independent of other phenomena. In the same way, in bootstrap physics
the word ‘particles’ does not mean three-dimensional specks which exist independently
of one another.
The word ‘emptiness’ here is
different from the everyday term. It transcends the usual concepts of emptiness
and form. To be empty is not to be non-existent. It is to be devoid of a
permanent identity.
So perhaps then,
the path to a national identity is to let
go of a national identity, and instead aspire
to inspire a consciousness that represents the global vision of the Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama: Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
Then, we could begin to walk the walk of 20th century French existential philosopher Jean-Paul Satre's claim that "existence precedes essence" or maybe what Unitarian Universalist's propose:"Deeds not Creeds."
It seems to me, that would be a pretty good start.
It seems to me, that would be a pretty good start.
May it be so.
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