This Land Is Your Land
- PREVIEW -
This Land Is Your Land
As I was walking that ribbon of highway; I saw above me that endless skyway. I saw below me that golden valley; this land was made for you and me.
Nobody living, can ever stop me, as I go walking that freedom highway. Nobody living, can ever make me turn back; this land was made for you and me.
Woody Guthrie – 1944
“The main idea about this song is, you think about these Eight words all the rest of your life and they'll come a bubbling up into Eighty Jillion all Union. Try it and see. THIS LAND IS MADE FOR YOU AND ME.” – Woody Guthrie, Library of Congress Archives
The Times They Are A-Changin'
Come gather 'round people, wherever you roam, and admit that the waters around you have grown; and accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone. If your time to you is worth savin', then you better start swimmin', or you'll sink like a stone; for the times they are a-changin'.
The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast. The slow one now will later be fast, as the present now will later be past. The order is rapidly fadin', and the first one now will later be last; for the times they are a-changin'.
Bob Dylan – 1964
--
PREFACE
Some might ask, “What, in particular, qualifies you to write a book of this nature?” And likewise, I could try presenting myself as some kind of renowned authority; citing all manner of credentials that might or might not be relevant, or even meaningful. But that’s neither helpful nor entirely honest. In reality, I’m no more of an expert on the whole of the American story than anyone else who has lived their small piece of its history.
At the same time, however, there’s a perspective that’s unique to me, just as there’s one that’s unique to you, a version of our shared story that only you can tell; one grounded in the person you are, the life you’ve lived, the context that shaped you, the choices you’ve made, and the social vantage point you have, in other words, that which makes you, you.
Just as the act of observing something changes it, all of society is shaped simply by us having been a part of it. At every juncture, there are contributions that only you can make, insights into us as a people that only someone who has lived your life can have. Today, given the challenges facing us, we need what you bring more than ever. I believe the same holds true for me and the life I’ve lived.
My own journey began in Birmingham, Alabama; sandwiched between the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. I was born and grew up in a time and place that was at the epicenter of the Civil Rights movement, and ground zero for our nation’s collective wrestling with race and all that it had wrought.
It was a time of intense turmoil; a period after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which devastated our nation, but before both Robert Kennedy, a sitting US senator and leading presidential candidate, and, of course, Martin Luther King, were killed. I grew up within walking distance of both 16th Street Baptist Church and the Birmingham Jail, surrounded by all manner of people active in the cause.
I was raised by my grandmother, the focus of Me and Mary, and by the family she grafted me into. That book was both a window into the extraordinary woman she was, despite being poor, colored, southern and female, all while living in early twentieth century America, and an attempt to capture some of the many life lessons she taught me.
It was her posture toward the world; the generosity of spirit she exuded and the love for humanity she embodied that made me want to look at both my fellow Americans and our shared story, and learn to see them the way she did, and that I’d always seen her do. If you’ve read the book, The Help, or seen the film, The Long Walk Home, you have a sense of what that life was like, and the time in which Mary lived; the work available to a woman of her station, the deference she and my grandfather had to practice every moment they were out in public, etc.
Every day of the entire 6 months, 12 days I spent in the hospital after birth, she visited; undaunted by those who told her not to get her hopes up – that it would take a miracle for a child that sick, and that early, to survive. But for her, it was a forgone conclusion; I would be coming home. She started walking back and forth to work “over the mountain”, as Birminghamians called the wealthy enclave on the other side of Red Mountain; in order to save up cash, along with S&H green stamps, for the blanket she was determined to bring me home in.
It is she who instilled within me an unshakable belief in humanity and who taught me that no matter who we are, there’s something to love, and truly lovable, about everyone. This lesson would be reinforced in myriad ways by the people I’d meet in this most unlikely of places – 1970s Birmingham. But it was here, during my growing up, that I began to encounter a near-constant parade of ordinary folk – mostly southerners and many of them presenting as white – who were to me what the Good Samaritan was to the man beset by robbers.
There was Vincent Rosetta, the Italian owner of EZ Supermarket, who actually hired me after I came the next day to tell him about having stolen two loaves of the bread left by the deliveryman, on rolling racks, tucked in the entryway the night before, in order to feed my young sisters and brother. And Rev. James Graves, the charismatic African American minister who founded what might be Birmingham’s first intentionally interracial congregation, and who I met through Vincent, who’d allowed James free use of the storefront space next door to launch the church. I became the first member, and James named 10-year-old me the church’s first deacon.
There was the young, sandy-haired teacher who, unbeknownst to me, paid for and sent in the application for my entry into a high school for gifted and talented students that I didn’t even know existed. And the cashier who gave me shoes, shirts, etc. that she’d always bought for her grandsons. “I’ve lost the receipt and can’t return them,” she’d say every time. “Maybe you can try them on?” They always fit perfectly.
Her husband hired me to work on weekends at their house, pulling weeds, but we spent far more time on his hobby projects and eating cookies his wife had just baked. I’ll never forget the looks that shifted from shock, to indignation, to something resembling remorse, when, while walking down the sidewalk to the hardware store, this elderly Anglo man placed a protective arm around my shoulder like I was his own grandson; wordlessly daring anyone to object.
There was Ms. Jeanette, a beautiful afroed woman who could have been Mavis Staple’s twin. Though a widow raising four kids, she gave me a huge tip each time I walked her home with her groceries. Back before schools were offering free breakfast, she insisted that I bring my younger siblings by her house, where, along with her own kids, she fed us all oatmeal.
And James Pruitt, the likely gay, African American director of the Ramsay Singers – our high school’s award-winning concert choir. Though sight-reading proficiency was a prerequisite, he accepted me despite my being a music illiterate, then, came in early mornings to tutor me, and when I couldn’t afford the performance uniform, he and two other teachers paid for it.
One of those teachers was Helen Mabry, the Anglo Alabama history teacher who never shied away from the hard stuff, who taught me the importance of history, and who talked an incredibly shy boy into becoming VP of the Birmingham Club. And of course, there was my large family – siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles – who gave, and continue to give me, unconditional love, while holding firmly to the belief that I have something special to offer the world.
I’d gone to live with my mother and her family in middle school, and by ninth grade, we’d moved to the Brickyard – a high-density Birmingham housing project named after the brick wall that effectively made it a compound. It was here that I began to take up the mantle of spiritually grounded activism and became a budding community organizer, gathering 500 signatures to petition the City of Birmingham to provide lunches during the summer for kids who would have gotten free lunch during the school year.
I was a high school freshman when Dr. Richard Arrington made a bid to become our city’s first African American mayor, just 15 years after the showdown between Martin and Bull Connor. I volunteered, first canvassing socially white neighborhoods, then, speaking at historically white churches. Sister Rose, a blond, Pentecostal, beehive-wearing, sweetheart of a woman, took it upon herself to both book me at, and drive me to those churches.
She helped me with my little speech, then, insisting that I conclude with a song, accompanied me on piano. Eventually, as part of our society’s shared recognition of segregated housing as a failed experiment (but one that we’re repeating in our handling of homelessness today), the residents of the Brickyard were moved out, and the Brickyard itself, both razed and erased.
I went to college in Oklahoma (or, as they say, "the buckle on the Bible Belt"), where I was one of 400 African American students on a campus of 20,000. While there, I experienced my share of racial slights, as well as young people, exposed to ethnic diversity for the first time, acting out the same bigotry they’d been taught growing up, only to then have the authorities who taught it to them, punish them for it. At the same time, so many others sought to befriend me; almost as a way of pushing back against those very same scripts.
On balance, however, both the university and the people of Oklahoma were very good to me, and their kindness served to only affirm that same faith in humanity my grandmother bequeathed to me. As a result, I look back on my years as a Sooner with great affection. It was there that I realized that ministry was my calling, and though I’ve since had all manner of roles in everything from business to politics, arts to activism, that work, this caring for our collective soul, has always been central to who I am.
I was one of a thousand students who attended the special college service at a local Southern Baptist church, not realizing that there were over 50 denominational variations spanning from the social justice theology held by the likes of Martin and my grandfather Olden – both Baptist ministers – to the version that sanctioned slavery. There were certainly times that the institution, so culturally and doctrinally bound up in racialized history, left me feeling othered and alienated.
But far more often, from the young couple who accepted me, the only African American, and my best friend Tim as church-sponsored “Big Brothers” to their 5 and 6 year-old sons, to the head of student ministry who both encouraged me to attend a national conference for young African American ministers and paid for it; from the older alum who donated me a replacement car after a parishioner wrecked my first one, to Chip and Cindy, who always made me feel like a part of the family, it was individual people who both welcomed me in and gave me a sense of belonging.
That church put me on track to attend a Southern Baptist seminary in the San Francisco Bay Area, which led to me, as a young seminarian, serving as minister at a diverse, community-focused church with a deep commitment to inclusion. It was there that I’d come to work alongside an Anglo head pastor 20+ years my senior, and who, as fate would have it, was not just from Birmingham, but the same part of town. We’d apparently shopped at the same stores and frequented the same places.
But white flight hit the neighborhood of Ensley hard. In Sam’s day, everyone at his high school identified as white. By the time my sisters were at that same school, everyone identified as black, whereas I’d come of age during its transition. Sam and I shared remarkable commonalities from having been molded by the same place, ones that were evident enough that people took to calling us the “Birmingham Boys”. That unlikely partnership would be a source of reconciliation and healing for both of us, allowing our shared hometown’s history to teach us important things about how we as a nation can choose a better destiny.
Sam had sayings. And one of them I’ve carried with me is, “We’re already smarter than we are good.” Take American Christians. We’ve already heard more than 200 years’ worth of sermons and sat through millions of hours of Bible study; even as we did everything from defend slavery to devalue women to dehumanize gays. We don’t need to know more; we need to do better.
I've traveled through the deepest parts of the Deep South alone, and have been nothing but welcomed and included, and have experienced the fear of getting pulled over by a police officer in northern California, and felt the pressure – and terror – of having to do everything right so that the man with the gun didn’t feel threatened.
I've lived for years in the South, North, Midwest, West and East and am equal parts Alabamian, Oklahoman, Californian and New Yorker, with a hefty dose of Pacific Northwesterner thrown into the mix. I’m a byproduct of both Ivy and equally outstanding public higher education.
I’ve been shaped by both an exceptional magnet high school and by amazing teachers at my inner city grade school. My way of making sense of the world combines frameworks from both divinity and business school, of social psychology and social activism. And as a chaplain, I've glimpsed America through the eyes of death row inmates and dying AIDS victims, 9/11 survivors and Hurricane Katrina refugees, of cancer patients and social justice protestors.
Through all this, I've had the chance to see a lot of who we Americans are, and it has both instilled in me a deeper love for my country and informed my understanding of what’s happening to it. I know we're not a nation of rabid bigots. But at the same time, our problems are very real, and very deep, and solving them will require that we both do, and be better. Because years of shrinking our sphere of compassion while blaming “those people” for what’s wrong with the world – all in a changing society – is exactly how we bring about our own ending. It’s like the early days of COVID; we were already in the midst of a crisis, we just didn’t know it.
The perspective presented here is both personal and collective. It’s personal because it’s deeply rooted in my own unique combination of qualities and experiences that inform my view of the world; my lens. I identify as multicultural, as an American of African, plus European and trace Native descent. But ancestral mix (and we all have one) is only one aspect of what makes us diverse.
Our lens is equally shaped by the places we’ve lived and experiences we’ve had, by our formal studies, our informal interests, and by the lessons that life itself teaches. Our unique combination of personality (in my case, that of an artistic, highly empathetic, spiritually oriented introvert who takes forever to make decisions) and all manner of personal traits inform us. (I’m left-handed, was 5’1” until 11th grade, and from early childhood, contended with a range of disabilities.)
The rituals of our communities of birth (and the ones we choose for ourselves), as well as the genders and sexualities we are assigned (and the ones we know ourselves to be) all inform our lens. Our traumas and our triumphs, loves and losses, hopes realized and relinquished all shape our lens. But that’s also what makes this collective; because no one’s lens is formed in a vacuum. Everyone who has contributed, in both good and not-so-good ways, to the American story has also impacted us. Which is why we all share so much in common.
As a kid, I was often called nicknames like “Professor” or “Little Preacher” – the former for my horn-rimmed glasses, and the latter, perhaps because even back then, I was such an avid evangelist for the philosophy that Martin and others espoused. I was very much a true believer; in the principles undergirding the cause, that the world could be a better place, and that each of us had the power to make it so. I’d grow up, however, to find I have far more in common with Bayard Rustin; the gay, unassuming, unsung hero of the Civil Rights movement who stood in the background instead of the spotlight.
A man who, like me, had to struggle to be a whole person, to embrace his ancestry, his sexuality, and his spirituality, even as others, in every group, rejected what didn’t reflect them. Nevertheless, it was Bayard, in many ways, the conscience of the movement, who originally introduced a young Martin to nonviolent resistance, who, through initiatives like the Freedom Riders, made direct social action an interracial effort, and who, perhaps more than anyone, infused the movement with compassion, humanity and inclusion.
I would be well into my 30s before even embarking upon the kind of self-embracing that Bayard, as a teen, had already mastered. But perhaps the most important commonality between me and Bayard, me and Martin, the courageous Rosa Parks, and so many others, is a profound belief in America itself; who she can be, and who, at heart, she’s always been.
It is they, this “great cloud of witnesses”, who instilled within me this desire to articulate a unifying narrative; a version of our shared story that might help us advance instead of turn back, enlarge the tent rather than circle the wagons. I’m not sure if that was achieved, but that was the goal; to help awaken us to the fact that right now, today, we’re authoring our future and, by our actions, shaping our fate. That not seeing the consequences is different from there not being any, and how understanding this difference has never been more important.
Like America herself, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to all those who came before me, and whose insights informed the way I view the world, and as author Barbara Grizzuti Harrison said, “There are no original ideas. There are only original people.” Philosophically, my greatest debt is to Kingian and Civil Rights era thought, in which I’ve been immersed since I was a small boy, and to the inclusive humanitarian spirituality that’s its foundation. I’m grateful for mentors who, by their belief in me, helped me learn to believe in myself.
I’m blessed with a family of origin that has lavished me, unceasingly, with an unfathomable amount of love, and a family of choice; friends whose support has run like anchor points through my life. I’m indebted to the many unnamed medical professionals, those mortal angels who did far more than treat a sickly little kid; they showered him with kindness.
I owe a special thanks to Crystal Crawford, Susanna Reynolds, Jon Garcia, and Steve Nieswander and Ann Voorhees, who struggled through this work at its roughest and still believed this to be an important message. And finally, I want to thank everyone who has opted to use the power of their life to make life better for all of us. Whether artist or preacher, student or teacher, your stories permeate this book, and it is you who taught me that, in the end, it’s what our souls bear forth that matters.
It's quite easy for a people to miss when it is in the midst of a pivotal moment, but that's exactly where we are – at a juncture where the charting of our destiny is as much in our hands today as it was in the hands of those who founded us. The Avett Brothers, in their song, We Americans, include the line, "But I dearly love this land, because of – and in spite of – We, the People." That sums us up fairly well – we, the people – are both the solution and the problem; our greatest hope and our gravest threat.
I truly believe that there remains a better future for us, one where we exist as one nation, indivisible; where both our diversity and that of others is embraced and extolled. But getting there hinges on awareness; of the choices that we're making and the danger we face, both doing things differently and doing different things. In his final sermon, the night before he was felled by an assassin’s bullet, Martin would describe the movement's experience in Birmingham:
We aren't going to let any mace stop us. We are masters in our nonviolent movement in disarming police forces; they don't know what to do, I've seen them so often. I remember in Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that majestic struggle there, we would move out of the 16th Street Baptist Church day after day; by the hundreds, we would move out. And Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me round"
… And then we would be thrown in the paddy wagons, and sometimes we were stacked in there like sardines in a can. And they would throw us in, and old Bull would say, "Take them off," and they did; and we would just go in the paddy wagon singing, "We Shall Overcome." And every now and then we'd get in the jail, and we'd see the jailers looking through the windows being moved by our prayers, and being moved by our words and our songs. And there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn't adjust to; and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer, and we won our struggle in Birmingham.
He would conclude that sermon with these words; so full of foreshadowing:
Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.
Today, we find ourselves at the crossroads that either leads to the Promised Land that Martin spoke of, or to the beginning of our own ending. Our final destination is chosen not only by the actions we take, but the spirit in which we take them. And this moment, despite its precariousness, affords us far more in the way of opportunity. Right now, more than at any time in our history, we have it within us to finally become the America we've always dreamed of being. But getting there, to this Promised Land where the dream itself has been made real, is something that can only be achieved one way, and that’s together, as a people.
INTRODUCTION
Clarettia was a hairdresser in Marin County, California. But summing her up in that way makes her sound oh so ordinary. She was anything but. A full-bodied, strikingly beautiful woman of unambiguously African descent, with waist-length hair that was all hers and four-inch stiletto heels, she was hard to miss – especially in a place where, in the early 90s, over 95% of the population presented as white. But Clarettia, who wore both her uniqueness and her brilliant smile like a crown, wasn’t at all deterred.
Both she and her business thrived, and given her talent, she was one of the most sought-after stylists in the Bay Area. Sitting in her salon chair was always more therapy session than hairstyling; reflective of Clarettia’s first full career; she’d been a social worker who tirelessly advocated on behalf of an island of poverty in an ocean of prosperity. Though she’d eventually change professions, she still found herself being who she was; both caring for those in need, and, just as importantly, serving as an ambassador for diversity in a society where it was often disparaged.
Her trademark was helping people turn something they saw as a liability into an asset. People who sat in Clarettia’s chair left with far more than a makeover; by learning to appreciate their own unique beauty, they also learned to see the same in others. The secret to her success was simple – she truly, genuinely cared for people and saw everyone as invaluable. Sadly, Clarettia would succumb to cancer at the height of her career, and for those who had the chance to know her, the loss would be profound. Yet it is those who will never meet her who are the most bereft. This book is about Clarettia.
Jim, as a twenty-something, Euro American man in 1970s Birmingham, always stood out. Not just because of his lanky build, good looks, and Matthew McConaughey grin, but because of his heart. There had always been far more to Jim than charisma and a good golf swing. It was as if he’d made it his personal mission to acknowledge humanity; both his and others friends and strangers, young and old. And despite frowns and stern looks, African Americans, and especially of the working class.
I never knew his growing up story, but someone, perhaps a woman like my own grandmother Mary, gave him unconditional love, and in doing so, likewise taught him to love. I met Jim at the A & P where I worked as a kid. I helped him take his groceries to his car (which he didn’t need, and in fact, he mostly loaded them himself). He always tipped me though, as if I’d actually done something. But what I will forever appreciate about Jim was his befriending of my younger brother; eight-year-old Joe.
Jim lived a few blocks from the supermarket, and somehow, he and my brother, who could make anyone smile, formed an unlikely friendship. Joe got a role model and Jim got the kid brother he’d clearly always wanted; something no one would have expected to happen in a racially charged Birmingham. Jim took Joe to see the Birmingham Barons play, and they spent more than a few Saturday afternoons trying to beat one another on Jim’s Atari console.
Jim and his girlfriend took Joe on his first trip to the beach, to the movies (where Joe reportedly caught them kissing), and had him over for barbeques at Jim’s house, along with their other friends. Joe boasted that he could beat everyone at arm wrestling (he couldn’t), and Jim was immensely proud of Joe, in that way that only a big brother can be. This book is about Jim. But it’s not specifically about Clarettia and Jim as individuals, nor because they’re so extraordinarily special. It’s about how they, as ordinary people, lived in ways that epitomize the best of us Americans and of humankind.
In that sense, this book is equally about people like Officer Roberts, the prison guard portrayed in Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, who, according to young Korey Wise of the Central Park Five, instead of responding in violence, hugged Korey, as the young man cried out in anguish, "Nobody gives a fuck about me," broken in overwhelming grief over the loss of Marci, his trans sister. And at the same time, it’s about Korey, who offered his sister full acceptance and unconditional love when so few others did, not to mention the extraordinary moral courage of Marci herself, to live her truth at a time when it was neither accepted nor allowed.
It’s about the founders of the Omaha, NE, Tri-Faith Initiative, which brings Christian, Islamic and Jewish worshippers together on one plot of land, and about young Greisa Martinez Rosas, the Executive Director of United We Dream, the largest immigrant youth-led community in the country; who boldly describes herself as “undocumented, unafraid, queer and unashamed”.
It’s about the thousands of women – especially African American women – who were on the forefront of, as well as leaders and sustainers of nationwide protests against police brutality, as they have done time and again in our country, and it’s about the group of black-identifying men in Louisville, all strangers out protesting deaths at the hands of police, who formed a protective shield around a lone officer who’d gotten separated from his unit and escorted him to his car.
It is about people like Brenda White Bull, descendant of Sitting Bull, who took the fight against Dakota Access and against state-sanctioned police violence all the way to the United Nations, and long-time civil rights activist Grace Lee Boggs, second generation Chinese and widow of African American activist James Boggs, to whom she was married for 40+ years. Grace would continue working to alleviate poverty across Detroit until her death, in 2015, at 100 years old.
It’s about essential workers who, through the worst of COVID, put themselves at risk on behalf of the rest of us, and about those who, through their service in everything from our military to the Peace Corps, dedicated their lives to doing the same. It is people like them, this new breed of American who have, since our founding, compelled us to be a better people, and in doing so, were heralds of the America we’re now on the cusp of becoming.
But above all, this book is about you. And especially those of you who’ve been told to hide yourself, to step back, that we don’t need you, that there’s no place for you here. I want to say emphatically – they were, in all ways, unequivocally wrong. This land is indeed your land. You are as much an heir to the whole of America and your claim to this place is as legitimate as anyone else’s. No one can tell you to “go back where you belong” or “get back in your place”. You’re already there. Further, only you, by being authentically you, can make the difference that you can make. And given how we’re changing, you’ve never been more needed. Like Princess Leah said to Obi-Wan, “You’re our only hope.”
Over America’s existence, there have been approximately 545 million lives lived; all of which have shaped us – some have made us better, and others, worse. But every life left its mark, on America, and on who America is because of them. Then, there’s who we are together. Like individuals, societies also have a life, and with that life, they shape the broader human story. Some have made us better, and others, worse; with each society getting to determine what their contribution to that grand story will be.
But while this book is about everyone, it’s not necessarily for everyone. It’s for people like those mentioned above; ones who persist in holding love in their hearts despite humankind’s lapses. It’s for those who get that, to paraphrase Einstein, we can’t solve our problems using the same tactics that created them. And it’s for those who are willing to take responsibility for how each of us shapes the fate of all of us. Because it’s not just the times that are a-changin; we, the people, are, and the same tools that once elevated some and debased others, now threaten to drown us all. They’re our own version of the Greek Symplegades, the Clashing Rocks.
We Americans have gotten so adept at impairing ourselves that we hardly notice we’re doing it. We recycle the same old scripts; asserting that we’re better, and because we’ve declared the rest of us worse, that they deserve what’s happening to them. Or often, what we’re doing to them. Like Cain to Abel (or Set to Osiris), we tell ourselves that our disavowing of our societal kin is justified.
But exploitation, like eating all our Halloween candy in one night, seems like a great idea. Until it isn’t. That’s because the Golden Rule isn’t just theoretical (“as you’d have them do unto you”); it’s prophetic. And since change is inevitable and diversity unstoppable, others will always get their chance to do unto us the very things we’ve done unto others.
The premise here is simple: every major societal problem we Americans are facing today, from rising poverty to increasingly caustic elections to escalating unrest and diminishing human regard, is tied to this massive sociological shift we’re already deep into, one where, in every way we currently measure, we’ll soon be a post-majority nation. In 20 years, our core majorities, from social whiteness to Christianization to heteronormativity, will all be downgraded to minority status.
But the systems we have, from the economy to the vote and the law, and until recently, even things like who was represented in commercials, were built to support majorities that soon will no longer exist and for a people we’ll no longer be. It’s up to us to do the work to transform our society into one where we all can thrive. Our path forward begins with Diversity, Democracy, and Humanity, three generative qualities that allow any society that embraces them to thrive.
Yet, few societies become places like this. That’s because there are actors among us who are working at cross-purposes with sustainability; less because they want us to fail and more due to three weaknesses we all, in varying degrees, share: an insatiable hunger for more (avarice); blinding fixations (myopia), and debilitating self-supremacy (hubris). These impulses are so strong that no matter where we are in history, and no matter our societal structure, when trouble comes, they continue to rush us headlong over the cliff. The test for you and me is whether our lives will contribute to the avoidance of this fate or to the sealing of it.
While this book is primarily about American society and our colorful history, so chock full of both successes and failures (as the adage goes, “write what you know”), this story is by no means the exclusive province of this country. In fact, much of what makes America “America” is only possible due to copious borrowing from so many other societies; both past and present, both with and without permission.
The goal is to set forth a set of ideas that, while rooted in the American story, have broader applicability, especially given that similar sociological shifts are occurring all over the world. But it is, at its heart, the story of us Americans; past, present and the future we choose. We’ll touch on the lives of extraordinary individuals who propelled us forward, as well as others who, believing in their own supremacy, pressed for their advantage at all costs, and in doing so, imperiled America herself.
There are consequences for letting our worst impulses go unchecked and unchallenged, ones that are more evident today than perhaps ever. Which leads us to America’s home-grown brand of social supremacy, one first manifest as slavery and Native displacement, before evolving into everything from racism to xenophobia. We’ll examine how this toxic ideology was crafted, and how it runs, like a fault line, through everything we’ve done, everything we’ve built, and everything we are. It’s the Frankenstein’s monster that we not only brought to life, but that we, by our choices, keep feeding.
The story itself pulls from a variety of sources, from the likes of writer James Baldwin to singer James Taylor, from Jesus to Rumi, and from presidents to those on the margins. But it’s the ideas most famously articulated by M.L.K., by Martin, which serve as this work’s foundation and its framing.
Finally, though parts history, analysis, and reflection, this book is, at its core, a story, an unfinished one that, together, we’re writing right now. It’s about our shared spiritual journey; who we can be at our best and who we have been at our worst, and about the “us” we are still becoming. It’s about the hope that, time and again, has grounded us; not the fingers-crossed, knock-on-wood variety that cynics mock or dismiss as naivete. It’s the weathered kind that, at every turn, has proven itself undeniable. The kind that undergirds our past, when our Founders declared “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all… are created equal.”
The kind that anchors us in the present, that compelled Bree Newsome, descendant of South Carolina slaves, to scale the flagpole on the grounds of the state capitol that still flew the Confederate battle flag and remove it, and that led Heather Heyer, an Anglo counter-protestor of a white nationalist rally to declare to the world, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Both were willing to risk their lives to ensure that today, “… indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” is far more than a pledge we recite. And it’s the kind that charters our future, invoked in that shared aspiration, “We, the people of the United States of America, in order to form a more perfect union...”
We’re picking up that story in the middle; right at this perilous place where we now find ourselves. Part One, The Beginning of the End is about our trajectory; from the Age of Promise, through the Age of Opportunism, to the Age of Recompense – our here and now.
We’ll explore how the culture we built (both revolutionary and reactionary) and choices we made (both kind and cruel), led us to this point, how our nation’s tectonic plates are shifting, and what that shifting requires of us. And we’ll get a sense of the vast diversity that made the United States itself possible, how this same diversity was penalized, subjugated, and, even eradicated, and of the corrosive constructs that pushed us in this direction.
Part Two, What a Fool Believes, delves into how otherwise flourishing societies become dysfunctional; locking themselves into iterative, accelerating processes of self-authored decline. This Degenerative Cycle (DGC) is comprised of Five AREAS; Alienation, Rationalization, Exploitation, Automation, Socialization, and back to Alienation. But with each revolution, there’s a bit less of all those things that make us, us. It’s what makes this an existential moment, every bit as critical as the Revolutionary or Civil War. Those before us may have decided who we are. But it rests with us to determine who we will be, what will become of us.
Which leads to Part Three, If You’re Out There, and to the Four Actions: Looking Deeper (Social Intelligence), Doing Better (Social Engagement), Drawing Closer (Social Cohesion), and Reaching Higher (Social Responsibility); or, in the language of my spiritual tradition, Wisdom, Justice, Kindness and Conscience; how each of us shapes the fate of all of us. If corrosive constructs and the DGC are how we ended up in the quicksand, the Actions are how we get out. We then return to our starting point, Diversity, Democracy and Humanity, the primal fires that, at the onset, forged us into a people. They might burn less fiercely in our chests, but they still burn, and as long as they do, both the dream and hope remains.
In the grand library chronicling the story of humankind, each person gets to write a sentence; each society a chapter. And herein lies our opportunity; to, individually and collectively, make our contribution, unequivocally, a good one. And it is in that sense that this is a revolutionary book. But the revolution is a personal one; each of us has the power to ensure that our generation meets this challenge, instead of being felled by it. But we can only do that by understanding how the society we’ve built is both beautiful and broken, by learning to celebrate the former and mend the latter, and by truly living up to our name – the United States of America. This is how we choose for ourselves a better destiny and chart for ourselves an enduring way forward.
--
PART I - THE BEGINNING OF THE END
1. All, Some and None
Trouble I’ve SeenNobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, nobody knows my sorrow. – American Negro Spiritual
Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward. – Book of Job 5:7
Between what might be, and what has been, this is the beginning; this is the beginning of the end. – Steve Moakler, Beginning of the End
We, the people, are in trouble. But for anyone who’s been paying attention, this isn’t exactly news. We might not fully grasp how we ended up here, or even agree on who’s to blame for us getting here. But if there’s one thing we Americans know, it’s how to spot trouble when we see it. But this isn’t the “same ole same ole” kind of trouble. It's the kind that President Lincoln was speaking of; the kind that no nation, no matter how powerfully conceived, no matter how deeply dedicated, can long endure. Still, this isn't the first time we've found ourselves in rough waters. Far from it. In fact, from the Revolution to the Civil War, from the Great Depression to the tumultuous 60s, from the oil crisis in the 80s to the 2009 financial collapse, from political gamesmanship to social injustice, we, the people, have more experience with unrest than we do with rest.
We’re a nation that has, even as we’ve prayed for peace, repeatedly declared war on itself. We've done it so often that we're no longer even sure that "United" States and "democracy" are still viable concepts. We extol the virtues of “liberty and justice for all”, but all too often, what we really mean is “some”. And “for some”, no matter the designated beneficiary, inevitably comes to mean one thing – none. That’s what’s most troubling about this trouble we’re now seeing; we miss how, not unlike with climate change, we’re complicit in our own suffering. Because societies start to die the day they determine that certain people don’t matter.
At the core of this is the cultural equivalent of a 9.0 earthquake – we’re changing in unprecedented ways, but lack the frameworks to survive this new reality. Take the idea of race, the lynchpin of American identity. Despite the European diaspora accounting for only 10% of humans alive today, and despite America’s lofty aspirations of equality at its founding, we’d invent racial whiteness out of whole cloth; essentially Anglicizing over 80 distinct people groups in the process.
We’d make legal whiteness a prerequisite for citizenship, then, use the group’s political power to build an American ruling class. But that time is over. We’re already more than a decade past the moment non-Anglo births surpassed Anglo births. In six years, that cohort starts reaching voting age, and in 20, we’ll be a nation with no demographic majority. And in that shift, we get to decide whether we’ll replace one form of self-supremacy with another, or abolish it altogether; allowing entirely new ways of relating to emerge.
Or, take religion, where we’ve gone from forced conversions during slavery to a time when those same groups are shrinking, and where our fastest-growing organized affiliation is “none”. Then, there’s our shifting understanding of both gender and sexuality. Today, 25% of Generation-Z identifies as non-straight (compared to 2.5% of Gen X) and the gender binary, increasingly abandoned – and that’s before getting to the massive majority that now sees marriage as a civil right. All three are examples of how constructs that once alienated the targeted are now isolating those who did the targeting.
Finally, there’s us as individuals. We’ve always known that we’re all different, that each of us is an “n” of one. That’s why some of us found it necessary to invent typologies; ones designed to ostensibly bring order to our world. But again, this is where we get it wrong. Those typologies were built to do the exact opposite of what we thought they did, and what we’ve been told that they do. They don't protect us from the “dangerous other”; they’re the mechanism by which the actual othering is done. They’re the tools that allow differentiated people to declare themselves the same, and in doing so, the new power. So, when supremacists say, "OUR RACE IS OUR NATION," they're essentially rewriting the Constitution; asserting that everywhere that refers to "nation" or “the people” is actually a reference to social whiteness, as defined by them.
Or, take militant religion. Since our 1954 push to include the phrase “under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance (incidentally, the same year as Brown v. Board of Education), we’ve been dead-set on declaring ourselves not only a Christian nation, but a particular kind of Christian; the kind that sanctioned slavery, consecrated segregation, and preached the gospel of racial superiority, the kind that believes that only issues impacting a segment of us matter.
But this isn’t just about our constructs or institutions, it’s about ourselves. The problem we’re facing is very much a spiritual one; increasingly evident in our inability to connect the dots between individual actions and collective outcomes, between the people we are and the society we have. We’re a nation suffering from three grievous wounds – allowing corrosive constructs to poison our culture (Part One), ignoring how taking advantage of some of us inevitably harms all of us (Part Two), and refusing to see how our individual actions shape our shared destiny (Part Three).
We Americans have embraced these malignant practices so thoroughly that, across the board, irrespective of politics or geography, ethnicity or ideology, they’ve become our new normal. But that’s entirely self-defeating. The only thing doubling down on human disregard can succeed at doing is accelerating our descent. We'll get into why tactics like these worked for a while (as well as why they were always doomed to fail) later. Most important here is understanding that they weren’t handed down from Mount Olympus or Sinai; they were constructed, and that hardly anything in this world is built, whether business or belief system, without an expected return on investment.
Which is why we, failing to grasp the severity of our situation, charged ahead; cannibalizing diversity, then, rewriting history to justify what we’d done to our societal kin. But what happens when the minorities are the new majority (or, as Bob Dylan put it, “the slow one will later be fast”)? Because it’s through our doing unto others that we teach others what’s acceptable to do unto us. So, yes, we've seen trouble before. But also not quite like this.
The actual words spoken by astronaut Jack Swigert were, "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here." And when those supporting the Apollo 13 mission heard them, they leapt into action. The question for those on the ground was not, "Who can we blame for this?" Nor was their focus on who would get credit. They weren't fixated on campaigning; convincing people to back their ideas – even if those ideas were the wrong ones.
It was all about solving the problem. Over these thirty-one chapters, that's our challenge; to revisit and learn from our social history, America's shared story. It's a sense-making endeavor; a delving into the workings of our own hearts, and how we choose a better destiny. The hope is, despite our continual history of so often rendering harm to get ahead, that we can prove that there's far more to us than that. Together, we can embrace a future that includes everyone in "we, the people" and that inspires each of us to “form a more perfect union”. But we only get there by understanding how we got here.
The work before us requires the challenging of an assumption that most of us carry; that there are individuals, and even entire groups, who we believe to be inferior or disposable, worthless or irredeemable, that we’d all be better off without. Or, put another way, the reason they do evil is because they're evil; the reason we do evil is because we made a mistake.
But even the most cursory examination of human nature reveals hearts that are capable of both; people who perpetrate the worst crimes against humanity – who commit genocide, or enslave others, who poison children's drinking water or steal old people's retirement – even they have people they love, and whom they’d lay down their lives for. They're not just cardboard villains. They have dreams. They've committed selfless acts of true kindness. Humanity lives in them just as it does in us. It was Marvin Gaye who sang, "We're all sensitive people, with so much to give." And he was right.
So, if humanity is our factory setting, and if we, and the arc of the moral universe "bends toward justice", how did we end up here? That's the question, along with what we do about it, that led to this book. Matt Damon's character, Mark Watney, in the film, The Martian, said: "At some point, everything's gonna go south on you and you're going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem and you solve the next one, and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home." That's also how a nation endures.
Life on the Ground – So Little Time
So little time. Try to understand that I'm – trying to make a move just to stay in the game; I try to stay awake and remember my name. Oh, everybody's changing, and I don't feel the same. – Keane, Everybody’s Changing
Remember when we thought we never would survive? But now, neither one of us is breaking. – Roberta Flack, Making Love
As much as perhaps anyone I’ve ever met, Nick Porcelli epitomized diversity and all that’s great about it. I met Nick my third year in New York at a dinner party hosted by a friend from Columbia University. As my friend predicted, Nick and I had much in common, both with respect to life experiences and interests.
It was one of those meets where instantly you’re old friends. A combination of Jewish, Italian and Cuban heritage, with the good looks of all three, Nick was a striking figure. Women (and men) constantly flirted with him, and he graciously let them know that he was happily married. “But if I wasn’t…” he’d always add, with a wink that made them blush and sent them on their way, feeling a bit better about themselves. Nick grew up in Chicago’s foster care system and, at eighteen, was out on his own with nothing but his wits and determination to carry him.
And carry him, they did. Through night classes and college, through work as a hospital orderly during the day, and through a range of administration jobs that would ultimately land him as a chief administrator at one of the world’s most prestigious law firms. Nick and his wife would adopt his sister’s two children when they were little more than newborns, and together, they would shower their daughter and son with all the unconditional love and sense of security that Nick’s own growing up lacked.
When he and I got to be friends, he was living and working in NYC during the week and commuting back home to Chicago on weekends. He lived in a tiny (normal, by New York standards) studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen that was warmly decorated and, every time I saw it, absolutely immaculate. Every suit hang the same direction and every shirt, tie and pair of shoes had its place. He also never knew a stranger. I remember on one of his trips back from Chicago, he saw a woman who he thought looked like Roberta Flack seated on the plane. I’d always been a fan, having heard my Aunt Pat, only a decade older than me, listening to her music.
But it was after watching the film, Making Love, and being stunned by her tender delivery of the theme song, that I started collecting all things Roberta. Nick, remembering this, went over and asked this woman if she was Roberta, and when he found out she was, he told her, “I just wanted you to know that my friend loves you and still plays your music all the time.” He came back with an autograph that said, “To Rodney, I understand you’re one of my biggest fans. Thank you. Love, Roberta.”
Nick did everything with purpose. Though I was a couple inches taller, I had to work to keep up with his long strides as we wove our way through busy New York City pedestrian traffic, everyone in a hurry. But then, suddenly, Nick would stop and have a conversation with the homeless veteran on the corner. He knew the man’s name and Nick, shined shoes and handkerchief in pocket, took a moment to acknowledge this man as a human being. “I’ll bring you a plate on my way back,” Nick would say, as we headed out to eat. And he always did.
Nick helped everyone, and he had a real soft spot for the elderly. His life in New York was like a Woody Allen film – full of wonderfully human, undeniably lovable characters; a brilliant intellectual who’d spent most his life in a wheelchair, a middle-aged woman bravely facing down a grave illness, a former Rockette who, though her glory days were behind her, was still a beauty, and so many others, of every ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age imaginable, from exceedingly wealthy to financially destitute.
On the floor of the apartment where I lived was a lovely elderly woman named Sylvia. Whenever she went out, even to the store, she was dressed impeccably. With her lace-trimmed dresses and waistcoat, her gloved hands and pillbox hat, she looked like she was heading out to have tea with Jackie Onassis. Nick saw her out collecting cans one day and mentioned it to me. The next time he came to visit, he insisted that we put together a care package for her with, among other things, bath salts, chocolates, fresh fruit, a bouquet of roses, and $50 he put in an envelope. We arranged it all in a basket and left it secretly by her door.
As my friend, Nick believed in me unequivocally. He’d tell me, “You’re going to change the world, you know that?” and because he believed it, in that moment, I would. Over the years, I’d draw down on this trust more times than I can count. Nick would die suddenly and unexpectedly at just 42 years of age, in 2011, and like the jagged cut it was, the wound of his loss has been slow to heal. But I wouldn’t trade the opportunity to have known him for anything.
You know how we sometimes get stuck on an album, listening to it over and over? For him, that was Keane’s debut release, Hopes and Fears. I remember him playing it, on infinite loop, in his apartment. The fifth song on that album was Everybody’s Changing, and once when it was playing, he volunteered that it was his favorite song. I never asked why and he never elaborated. I think, in part, because it felt like such a vulnerable admission, and partly because it made sense to me. Nick had been making moves to “stay in the game” his entire life, while at the same time, trying to stay awake and remember not just his own name, but those of everyone he’d meet.
Today, when I hear it, or even think of it, I cannot help but also think of my friend Nick. “So little time,” the singer sang; a sentiment that expresses so much of what comes to mind when I think of him – both how little time I’d have him in my life, and how cognizant he was of how little time any of us has. So, Nick lived more fully, more deeply, into every single moment. He savored food, and conversation, and experiences. He took his family on vacation while he could. He extended his hand and walked this earth like every person – no matter how wealthy or poor – was his equal, and he, theirs. Nick savored life.
As a result, Nick’s favorite song has taken on a broader meaning; not just about his life, but all our lives. Increasingly, it reminds me of the reality of change – a truth that Nick’s own life had made him so aware of – and why he lived his life the way he did. Everybody is changing. And if I carry within me one lesson learned from the privilege of having known Nick Porcelli and watching how he lived, it is this: for each of us, our highest and most sacred work is embracing those around us in two equally important ways – celebrating the person they’re in the process of becoming, and cherishing the person they’ve always been.
We’ve Only Just Begun
I still do believe in the bigger table, but it’s more difficult than ever to keep that faith, probably because the resistance to it is so great. We have to be the resistance to that resistance. – Pastor John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table
The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and danger. The world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity - or it will move apart. – President Franklin D. Roosevelt
“This isn’t the world you wanted,” said Jerome to Charlotte in Westworld’s series finale, “But it’s the world you built”. This quote not only reflects a key insight about the power of human agency, but for me, personally, it speaks to one of my most fervent hopes; that somehow, together, we’ll prove ourselves to be a people whose best days still lie ahead of us. But right now, that’s not the future we’re necessarily creating. Everything from our toxic social climate to our troubled political processes reveals how while this might not be the world we Americans wanted, it’s the one that we, by lives lived and actions taken, have built.
This was a realization we began having as far back as the 60s, when Governor Wallace, backed by supporters, used his body to prevent University of Alabama’s integration, when live television beamed images of children swept down the streets of downtown Birmingham by fire hoses, and when Troopers charged their horses into marchers on the Edmond Pettus Bridge.
The sheer violence brought us face-to-face with the pain of our societal kin, and with our complicity in it. And in doing so, it deprived us of the ability to continue telling ourselves that all was OK. But that’s a tough place to be, so we rewrote the story to be about our dividedness. Instead of victim and attacker, it’s the Hatfields and McCoys; with both parties equally to blame. We couldn’t allow ourselves to see how by hurting them, we’d harmed ourselves, and that same denial made it impossible to fully address the problems our own actions created.
Fast-forward sixty years, and here we are, still talking about our dividedness just like we did back then; like it’s new, sudden, and has nothing to do with our behavior. But the thing is, not only is this narrative false, it isn’t actually new. We’ve been fighting against our better angels since the onset of the Revolution itself, and despite our name, uniting has never been our strong suit. But at our beginning, our hopes burned so much brighter.
All social entities, whether communities or congregations, book clubs or bowling leagues, corporations or civilizations, start out brimming with possibility. “So many roads to choose,” the Carpenters sang in their 70s wedding classic. “We start out walking and learn to run, and yes, we've just begun.” These communities we form and societies we create are buoyed by hope and held aloft by the dreams that called them forth. And that’s where they could remain, thriving and becoming in this Age of Promise.
But they rarely stay there for long. Something about our fear of both growth and change tends to foster counter-sustainability among us. The same unknowns that once inspired us become overwhelming. We begin to act out in ways that diminish hopes and sever ties. The roads from which we can choose are fewer and we tire of running. We become realists, pragmatists and cynics. We start to expect less from ourselves and believe the worst in others. And that heralds, for any society, the beginning of the end.
Societies, like everything else, exist in perpetual states of dynamism. The question is not whether they’ll face challenges that could be their undoing. They will, many times over. Whether confronted by rivals, impacted by disease, visited by catastrophe or simply worn down by the sum of their own choices, one thing human history proves is that any society that refuses to change is one that won’t last. “So little time” could just as easily be applied to nations as individuals.
And that’s where things get particularly tough. Because, America, like all societies, exists by agreement. Everything from our borders to our determination of who is, and who is not, one of us, is real because we agree that it is. That’s what makes this particular crossing so perilous. We don’t have the hindsight that our posterity, those who will look back and tell our story, will have. What awaits us on the other side of any threshold is unknown. Because it’s not just everybody, as Nick reminded us, who’s changing; but everything; all of existence is both inherently the same and simultaneously becoming something different.
The people that emerges from its crucible will, by definition, be different from the one that entered. But like the butterfly is to the caterpillar, they will also be the same. In that moment of existential crisis, societies either go extinct, or they find that they’ve already developed within them the ability to author their own transformation; emerging as something simultaneously the same and different, and at the same time, better. All of which leads to a question: What if the inevitable demise of society, isn’t? What if the very reason they end is because they insist on never changing?
What if what happens next isn’t already written, and that we’re penning it right now – by what we do today? And what if, by embracing certain traits that counteract our own worst tendencies and by committing to the work of forming a more perfect union, a land made for both you and me, we can create societies that adapt, evolve, reinvent themselves, thrive and ultimately, sustain – remaining perpetually in the Age of Promise? We could.
One last thing to remember about societies is that they live because the people who are part of them, believe. We infuse them with love, imbue them with life and nurture them. We sacrifice for their well-being and rally to their defense. We create their institutions and infrastructure and entrust them to act on our behalf. And because we believe, we’re bound to and care deeply for the members of our societal family; both individually and as a collective.
When those same people stop believing, those societies begin to die.
--
- Get a full copy of This Land Is Your Land -
- Back to HOME -
- PREVIEW -
This Land Is Your Land
As I was walking that ribbon of highway; I saw above me that endless skyway. I saw below me that golden valley; this land was made for you and me.
Nobody living, can ever stop me, as I go walking that freedom highway. Nobody living, can ever make me turn back; this land was made for you and me.
Woody Guthrie – 1944
“The main idea about this song is, you think about these Eight words all the rest of your life and they'll come a bubbling up into Eighty Jillion all Union. Try it and see. THIS LAND IS MADE FOR YOU AND ME.” – Woody Guthrie, Library of Congress Archives
The Times They Are A-Changin'
Come gather 'round people, wherever you roam, and admit that the waters around you have grown; and accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone. If your time to you is worth savin', then you better start swimmin', or you'll sink like a stone; for the times they are a-changin'.
The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast. The slow one now will later be fast, as the present now will later be past. The order is rapidly fadin', and the first one now will later be last; for the times they are a-changin'.
Bob Dylan – 1964
--
PREFACE
Some might ask, “What, in particular, qualifies you to write a book of this nature?” And likewise, I could try presenting myself as some kind of renowned authority; citing all manner of credentials that might or might not be relevant, or even meaningful. But that’s neither helpful nor entirely honest. In reality, I’m no more of an expert on the whole of the American story than anyone else who has lived their small piece of its history.
At the same time, however, there’s a perspective that’s unique to me, just as there’s one that’s unique to you, a version of our shared story that only you can tell; one grounded in the person you are, the life you’ve lived, the context that shaped you, the choices you’ve made, and the social vantage point you have, in other words, that which makes you, you.
Just as the act of observing something changes it, all of society is shaped simply by us having been a part of it. At every juncture, there are contributions that only you can make, insights into us as a people that only someone who has lived your life can have. Today, given the challenges facing us, we need what you bring more than ever. I believe the same holds true for me and the life I’ve lived.
My own journey began in Birmingham, Alabama; sandwiched between the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. I was born and grew up in a time and place that was at the epicenter of the Civil Rights movement, and ground zero for our nation’s collective wrestling with race and all that it had wrought.
It was a time of intense turmoil; a period after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which devastated our nation, but before both Robert Kennedy, a sitting US senator and leading presidential candidate, and, of course, Martin Luther King, were killed. I grew up within walking distance of both 16th Street Baptist Church and the Birmingham Jail, surrounded by all manner of people active in the cause.
I was raised by my grandmother, the focus of Me and Mary, and by the family she grafted me into. That book was both a window into the extraordinary woman she was, despite being poor, colored, southern and female, all while living in early twentieth century America, and an attempt to capture some of the many life lessons she taught me.
It was her posture toward the world; the generosity of spirit she exuded and the love for humanity she embodied that made me want to look at both my fellow Americans and our shared story, and learn to see them the way she did, and that I’d always seen her do. If you’ve read the book, The Help, or seen the film, The Long Walk Home, you have a sense of what that life was like, and the time in which Mary lived; the work available to a woman of her station, the deference she and my grandfather had to practice every moment they were out in public, etc.
Every day of the entire 6 months, 12 days I spent in the hospital after birth, she visited; undaunted by those who told her not to get her hopes up – that it would take a miracle for a child that sick, and that early, to survive. But for her, it was a forgone conclusion; I would be coming home. She started walking back and forth to work “over the mountain”, as Birminghamians called the wealthy enclave on the other side of Red Mountain; in order to save up cash, along with S&H green stamps, for the blanket she was determined to bring me home in.
It is she who instilled within me an unshakable belief in humanity and who taught me that no matter who we are, there’s something to love, and truly lovable, about everyone. This lesson would be reinforced in myriad ways by the people I’d meet in this most unlikely of places – 1970s Birmingham. But it was here, during my growing up, that I began to encounter a near-constant parade of ordinary folk – mostly southerners and many of them presenting as white – who were to me what the Good Samaritan was to the man beset by robbers.
There was Vincent Rosetta, the Italian owner of EZ Supermarket, who actually hired me after I came the next day to tell him about having stolen two loaves of the bread left by the deliveryman, on rolling racks, tucked in the entryway the night before, in order to feed my young sisters and brother. And Rev. James Graves, the charismatic African American minister who founded what might be Birmingham’s first intentionally interracial congregation, and who I met through Vincent, who’d allowed James free use of the storefront space next door to launch the church. I became the first member, and James named 10-year-old me the church’s first deacon.
There was the young, sandy-haired teacher who, unbeknownst to me, paid for and sent in the application for my entry into a high school for gifted and talented students that I didn’t even know existed. And the cashier who gave me shoes, shirts, etc. that she’d always bought for her grandsons. “I’ve lost the receipt and can’t return them,” she’d say every time. “Maybe you can try them on?” They always fit perfectly.
Her husband hired me to work on weekends at their house, pulling weeds, but we spent far more time on his hobby projects and eating cookies his wife had just baked. I’ll never forget the looks that shifted from shock, to indignation, to something resembling remorse, when, while walking down the sidewalk to the hardware store, this elderly Anglo man placed a protective arm around my shoulder like I was his own grandson; wordlessly daring anyone to object.
There was Ms. Jeanette, a beautiful afroed woman who could have been Mavis Staple’s twin. Though a widow raising four kids, she gave me a huge tip each time I walked her home with her groceries. Back before schools were offering free breakfast, she insisted that I bring my younger siblings by her house, where, along with her own kids, she fed us all oatmeal.
And James Pruitt, the likely gay, African American director of the Ramsay Singers – our high school’s award-winning concert choir. Though sight-reading proficiency was a prerequisite, he accepted me despite my being a music illiterate, then, came in early mornings to tutor me, and when I couldn’t afford the performance uniform, he and two other teachers paid for it.
One of those teachers was Helen Mabry, the Anglo Alabama history teacher who never shied away from the hard stuff, who taught me the importance of history, and who talked an incredibly shy boy into becoming VP of the Birmingham Club. And of course, there was my large family – siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles – who gave, and continue to give me, unconditional love, while holding firmly to the belief that I have something special to offer the world.
I’d gone to live with my mother and her family in middle school, and by ninth grade, we’d moved to the Brickyard – a high-density Birmingham housing project named after the brick wall that effectively made it a compound. It was here that I began to take up the mantle of spiritually grounded activism and became a budding community organizer, gathering 500 signatures to petition the City of Birmingham to provide lunches during the summer for kids who would have gotten free lunch during the school year.
I was a high school freshman when Dr. Richard Arrington made a bid to become our city’s first African American mayor, just 15 years after the showdown between Martin and Bull Connor. I volunteered, first canvassing socially white neighborhoods, then, speaking at historically white churches. Sister Rose, a blond, Pentecostal, beehive-wearing, sweetheart of a woman, took it upon herself to both book me at, and drive me to those churches.
She helped me with my little speech, then, insisting that I conclude with a song, accompanied me on piano. Eventually, as part of our society’s shared recognition of segregated housing as a failed experiment (but one that we’re repeating in our handling of homelessness today), the residents of the Brickyard were moved out, and the Brickyard itself, both razed and erased.
I went to college in Oklahoma (or, as they say, "the buckle on the Bible Belt"), where I was one of 400 African American students on a campus of 20,000. While there, I experienced my share of racial slights, as well as young people, exposed to ethnic diversity for the first time, acting out the same bigotry they’d been taught growing up, only to then have the authorities who taught it to them, punish them for it. At the same time, so many others sought to befriend me; almost as a way of pushing back against those very same scripts.
On balance, however, both the university and the people of Oklahoma were very good to me, and their kindness served to only affirm that same faith in humanity my grandmother bequeathed to me. As a result, I look back on my years as a Sooner with great affection. It was there that I realized that ministry was my calling, and though I’ve since had all manner of roles in everything from business to politics, arts to activism, that work, this caring for our collective soul, has always been central to who I am.
I was one of a thousand students who attended the special college service at a local Southern Baptist church, not realizing that there were over 50 denominational variations spanning from the social justice theology held by the likes of Martin and my grandfather Olden – both Baptist ministers – to the version that sanctioned slavery. There were certainly times that the institution, so culturally and doctrinally bound up in racialized history, left me feeling othered and alienated.
But far more often, from the young couple who accepted me, the only African American, and my best friend Tim as church-sponsored “Big Brothers” to their 5 and 6 year-old sons, to the head of student ministry who both encouraged me to attend a national conference for young African American ministers and paid for it; from the older alum who donated me a replacement car after a parishioner wrecked my first one, to Chip and Cindy, who always made me feel like a part of the family, it was individual people who both welcomed me in and gave me a sense of belonging.
That church put me on track to attend a Southern Baptist seminary in the San Francisco Bay Area, which led to me, as a young seminarian, serving as minister at a diverse, community-focused church with a deep commitment to inclusion. It was there that I’d come to work alongside an Anglo head pastor 20+ years my senior, and who, as fate would have it, was not just from Birmingham, but the same part of town. We’d apparently shopped at the same stores and frequented the same places.
But white flight hit the neighborhood of Ensley hard. In Sam’s day, everyone at his high school identified as white. By the time my sisters were at that same school, everyone identified as black, whereas I’d come of age during its transition. Sam and I shared remarkable commonalities from having been molded by the same place, ones that were evident enough that people took to calling us the “Birmingham Boys”. That unlikely partnership would be a source of reconciliation and healing for both of us, allowing our shared hometown’s history to teach us important things about how we as a nation can choose a better destiny.
Sam had sayings. And one of them I’ve carried with me is, “We’re already smarter than we are good.” Take American Christians. We’ve already heard more than 200 years’ worth of sermons and sat through millions of hours of Bible study; even as we did everything from defend slavery to devalue women to dehumanize gays. We don’t need to know more; we need to do better.
I've traveled through the deepest parts of the Deep South alone, and have been nothing but welcomed and included, and have experienced the fear of getting pulled over by a police officer in northern California, and felt the pressure – and terror – of having to do everything right so that the man with the gun didn’t feel threatened.
I've lived for years in the South, North, Midwest, West and East and am equal parts Alabamian, Oklahoman, Californian and New Yorker, with a hefty dose of Pacific Northwesterner thrown into the mix. I’m a byproduct of both Ivy and equally outstanding public higher education.
I’ve been shaped by both an exceptional magnet high school and by amazing teachers at my inner city grade school. My way of making sense of the world combines frameworks from both divinity and business school, of social psychology and social activism. And as a chaplain, I've glimpsed America through the eyes of death row inmates and dying AIDS victims, 9/11 survivors and Hurricane Katrina refugees, of cancer patients and social justice protestors.
Through all this, I've had the chance to see a lot of who we Americans are, and it has both instilled in me a deeper love for my country and informed my understanding of what’s happening to it. I know we're not a nation of rabid bigots. But at the same time, our problems are very real, and very deep, and solving them will require that we both do, and be better. Because years of shrinking our sphere of compassion while blaming “those people” for what’s wrong with the world – all in a changing society – is exactly how we bring about our own ending. It’s like the early days of COVID; we were already in the midst of a crisis, we just didn’t know it.
The perspective presented here is both personal and collective. It’s personal because it’s deeply rooted in my own unique combination of qualities and experiences that inform my view of the world; my lens. I identify as multicultural, as an American of African, plus European and trace Native descent. But ancestral mix (and we all have one) is only one aspect of what makes us diverse.
Our lens is equally shaped by the places we’ve lived and experiences we’ve had, by our formal studies, our informal interests, and by the lessons that life itself teaches. Our unique combination of personality (in my case, that of an artistic, highly empathetic, spiritually oriented introvert who takes forever to make decisions) and all manner of personal traits inform us. (I’m left-handed, was 5’1” until 11th grade, and from early childhood, contended with a range of disabilities.)
The rituals of our communities of birth (and the ones we choose for ourselves), as well as the genders and sexualities we are assigned (and the ones we know ourselves to be) all inform our lens. Our traumas and our triumphs, loves and losses, hopes realized and relinquished all shape our lens. But that’s also what makes this collective; because no one’s lens is formed in a vacuum. Everyone who has contributed, in both good and not-so-good ways, to the American story has also impacted us. Which is why we all share so much in common.
As a kid, I was often called nicknames like “Professor” or “Little Preacher” – the former for my horn-rimmed glasses, and the latter, perhaps because even back then, I was such an avid evangelist for the philosophy that Martin and others espoused. I was very much a true believer; in the principles undergirding the cause, that the world could be a better place, and that each of us had the power to make it so. I’d grow up, however, to find I have far more in common with Bayard Rustin; the gay, unassuming, unsung hero of the Civil Rights movement who stood in the background instead of the spotlight.
A man who, like me, had to struggle to be a whole person, to embrace his ancestry, his sexuality, and his spirituality, even as others, in every group, rejected what didn’t reflect them. Nevertheless, it was Bayard, in many ways, the conscience of the movement, who originally introduced a young Martin to nonviolent resistance, who, through initiatives like the Freedom Riders, made direct social action an interracial effort, and who, perhaps more than anyone, infused the movement with compassion, humanity and inclusion.
I would be well into my 30s before even embarking upon the kind of self-embracing that Bayard, as a teen, had already mastered. But perhaps the most important commonality between me and Bayard, me and Martin, the courageous Rosa Parks, and so many others, is a profound belief in America itself; who she can be, and who, at heart, she’s always been.
It is they, this “great cloud of witnesses”, who instilled within me this desire to articulate a unifying narrative; a version of our shared story that might help us advance instead of turn back, enlarge the tent rather than circle the wagons. I’m not sure if that was achieved, but that was the goal; to help awaken us to the fact that right now, today, we’re authoring our future and, by our actions, shaping our fate. That not seeing the consequences is different from there not being any, and how understanding this difference has never been more important.
Like America herself, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to all those who came before me, and whose insights informed the way I view the world, and as author Barbara Grizzuti Harrison said, “There are no original ideas. There are only original people.” Philosophically, my greatest debt is to Kingian and Civil Rights era thought, in which I’ve been immersed since I was a small boy, and to the inclusive humanitarian spirituality that’s its foundation. I’m grateful for mentors who, by their belief in me, helped me learn to believe in myself.
I’m blessed with a family of origin that has lavished me, unceasingly, with an unfathomable amount of love, and a family of choice; friends whose support has run like anchor points through my life. I’m indebted to the many unnamed medical professionals, those mortal angels who did far more than treat a sickly little kid; they showered him with kindness.
I owe a special thanks to Crystal Crawford, Susanna Reynolds, Jon Garcia, and Steve Nieswander and Ann Voorhees, who struggled through this work at its roughest and still believed this to be an important message. And finally, I want to thank everyone who has opted to use the power of their life to make life better for all of us. Whether artist or preacher, student or teacher, your stories permeate this book, and it is you who taught me that, in the end, it’s what our souls bear forth that matters.
It's quite easy for a people to miss when it is in the midst of a pivotal moment, but that's exactly where we are – at a juncture where the charting of our destiny is as much in our hands today as it was in the hands of those who founded us. The Avett Brothers, in their song, We Americans, include the line, "But I dearly love this land, because of – and in spite of – We, the People." That sums us up fairly well – we, the people – are both the solution and the problem; our greatest hope and our gravest threat.
I truly believe that there remains a better future for us, one where we exist as one nation, indivisible; where both our diversity and that of others is embraced and extolled. But getting there hinges on awareness; of the choices that we're making and the danger we face, both doing things differently and doing different things. In his final sermon, the night before he was felled by an assassin’s bullet, Martin would describe the movement's experience in Birmingham:
We aren't going to let any mace stop us. We are masters in our nonviolent movement in disarming police forces; they don't know what to do, I've seen them so often. I remember in Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that majestic struggle there, we would move out of the 16th Street Baptist Church day after day; by the hundreds, we would move out. And Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me round"
… And then we would be thrown in the paddy wagons, and sometimes we were stacked in there like sardines in a can. And they would throw us in, and old Bull would say, "Take them off," and they did; and we would just go in the paddy wagon singing, "We Shall Overcome." And every now and then we'd get in the jail, and we'd see the jailers looking through the windows being moved by our prayers, and being moved by our words and our songs. And there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn't adjust to; and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer, and we won our struggle in Birmingham.
He would conclude that sermon with these words; so full of foreshadowing:
Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.
Today, we find ourselves at the crossroads that either leads to the Promised Land that Martin spoke of, or to the beginning of our own ending. Our final destination is chosen not only by the actions we take, but the spirit in which we take them. And this moment, despite its precariousness, affords us far more in the way of opportunity. Right now, more than at any time in our history, we have it within us to finally become the America we've always dreamed of being. But getting there, to this Promised Land where the dream itself has been made real, is something that can only be achieved one way, and that’s together, as a people.
INTRODUCTION
Clarettia was a hairdresser in Marin County, California. But summing her up in that way makes her sound oh so ordinary. She was anything but. A full-bodied, strikingly beautiful woman of unambiguously African descent, with waist-length hair that was all hers and four-inch stiletto heels, she was hard to miss – especially in a place where, in the early 90s, over 95% of the population presented as white. But Clarettia, who wore both her uniqueness and her brilliant smile like a crown, wasn’t at all deterred.
Both she and her business thrived, and given her talent, she was one of the most sought-after stylists in the Bay Area. Sitting in her salon chair was always more therapy session than hairstyling; reflective of Clarettia’s first full career; she’d been a social worker who tirelessly advocated on behalf of an island of poverty in an ocean of prosperity. Though she’d eventually change professions, she still found herself being who she was; both caring for those in need, and, just as importantly, serving as an ambassador for diversity in a society where it was often disparaged.
Her trademark was helping people turn something they saw as a liability into an asset. People who sat in Clarettia’s chair left with far more than a makeover; by learning to appreciate their own unique beauty, they also learned to see the same in others. The secret to her success was simple – she truly, genuinely cared for people and saw everyone as invaluable. Sadly, Clarettia would succumb to cancer at the height of her career, and for those who had the chance to know her, the loss would be profound. Yet it is those who will never meet her who are the most bereft. This book is about Clarettia.
Jim, as a twenty-something, Euro American man in 1970s Birmingham, always stood out. Not just because of his lanky build, good looks, and Matthew McConaughey grin, but because of his heart. There had always been far more to Jim than charisma and a good golf swing. It was as if he’d made it his personal mission to acknowledge humanity; both his and others friends and strangers, young and old. And despite frowns and stern looks, African Americans, and especially of the working class.
I never knew his growing up story, but someone, perhaps a woman like my own grandmother Mary, gave him unconditional love, and in doing so, likewise taught him to love. I met Jim at the A & P where I worked as a kid. I helped him take his groceries to his car (which he didn’t need, and in fact, he mostly loaded them himself). He always tipped me though, as if I’d actually done something. But what I will forever appreciate about Jim was his befriending of my younger brother; eight-year-old Joe.
Jim lived a few blocks from the supermarket, and somehow, he and my brother, who could make anyone smile, formed an unlikely friendship. Joe got a role model and Jim got the kid brother he’d clearly always wanted; something no one would have expected to happen in a racially charged Birmingham. Jim took Joe to see the Birmingham Barons play, and they spent more than a few Saturday afternoons trying to beat one another on Jim’s Atari console.
Jim and his girlfriend took Joe on his first trip to the beach, to the movies (where Joe reportedly caught them kissing), and had him over for barbeques at Jim’s house, along with their other friends. Joe boasted that he could beat everyone at arm wrestling (he couldn’t), and Jim was immensely proud of Joe, in that way that only a big brother can be. This book is about Jim. But it’s not specifically about Clarettia and Jim as individuals, nor because they’re so extraordinarily special. It’s about how they, as ordinary people, lived in ways that epitomize the best of us Americans and of humankind.
In that sense, this book is equally about people like Officer Roberts, the prison guard portrayed in Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, who, according to young Korey Wise of the Central Park Five, instead of responding in violence, hugged Korey, as the young man cried out in anguish, "Nobody gives a fuck about me," broken in overwhelming grief over the loss of Marci, his trans sister. And at the same time, it’s about Korey, who offered his sister full acceptance and unconditional love when so few others did, not to mention the extraordinary moral courage of Marci herself, to live her truth at a time when it was neither accepted nor allowed.
It’s about the founders of the Omaha, NE, Tri-Faith Initiative, which brings Christian, Islamic and Jewish worshippers together on one plot of land, and about young Greisa Martinez Rosas, the Executive Director of United We Dream, the largest immigrant youth-led community in the country; who boldly describes herself as “undocumented, unafraid, queer and unashamed”.
It’s about the thousands of women – especially African American women – who were on the forefront of, as well as leaders and sustainers of nationwide protests against police brutality, as they have done time and again in our country, and it’s about the group of black-identifying men in Louisville, all strangers out protesting deaths at the hands of police, who formed a protective shield around a lone officer who’d gotten separated from his unit and escorted him to his car.
It is about people like Brenda White Bull, descendant of Sitting Bull, who took the fight against Dakota Access and against state-sanctioned police violence all the way to the United Nations, and long-time civil rights activist Grace Lee Boggs, second generation Chinese and widow of African American activist James Boggs, to whom she was married for 40+ years. Grace would continue working to alleviate poverty across Detroit until her death, in 2015, at 100 years old.
It’s about essential workers who, through the worst of COVID, put themselves at risk on behalf of the rest of us, and about those who, through their service in everything from our military to the Peace Corps, dedicated their lives to doing the same. It is people like them, this new breed of American who have, since our founding, compelled us to be a better people, and in doing so, were heralds of the America we’re now on the cusp of becoming.
But above all, this book is about you. And especially those of you who’ve been told to hide yourself, to step back, that we don’t need you, that there’s no place for you here. I want to say emphatically – they were, in all ways, unequivocally wrong. This land is indeed your land. You are as much an heir to the whole of America and your claim to this place is as legitimate as anyone else’s. No one can tell you to “go back where you belong” or “get back in your place”. You’re already there. Further, only you, by being authentically you, can make the difference that you can make. And given how we’re changing, you’ve never been more needed. Like Princess Leah said to Obi-Wan, “You’re our only hope.”
Over America’s existence, there have been approximately 545 million lives lived; all of which have shaped us – some have made us better, and others, worse. But every life left its mark, on America, and on who America is because of them. Then, there’s who we are together. Like individuals, societies also have a life, and with that life, they shape the broader human story. Some have made us better, and others, worse; with each society getting to determine what their contribution to that grand story will be.
But while this book is about everyone, it’s not necessarily for everyone. It’s for people like those mentioned above; ones who persist in holding love in their hearts despite humankind’s lapses. It’s for those who get that, to paraphrase Einstein, we can’t solve our problems using the same tactics that created them. And it’s for those who are willing to take responsibility for how each of us shapes the fate of all of us. Because it’s not just the times that are a-changin; we, the people, are, and the same tools that once elevated some and debased others, now threaten to drown us all. They’re our own version of the Greek Symplegades, the Clashing Rocks.
We Americans have gotten so adept at impairing ourselves that we hardly notice we’re doing it. We recycle the same old scripts; asserting that we’re better, and because we’ve declared the rest of us worse, that they deserve what’s happening to them. Or often, what we’re doing to them. Like Cain to Abel (or Set to Osiris), we tell ourselves that our disavowing of our societal kin is justified.
But exploitation, like eating all our Halloween candy in one night, seems like a great idea. Until it isn’t. That’s because the Golden Rule isn’t just theoretical (“as you’d have them do unto you”); it’s prophetic. And since change is inevitable and diversity unstoppable, others will always get their chance to do unto us the very things we’ve done unto others.
The premise here is simple: every major societal problem we Americans are facing today, from rising poverty to increasingly caustic elections to escalating unrest and diminishing human regard, is tied to this massive sociological shift we’re already deep into, one where, in every way we currently measure, we’ll soon be a post-majority nation. In 20 years, our core majorities, from social whiteness to Christianization to heteronormativity, will all be downgraded to minority status.
But the systems we have, from the economy to the vote and the law, and until recently, even things like who was represented in commercials, were built to support majorities that soon will no longer exist and for a people we’ll no longer be. It’s up to us to do the work to transform our society into one where we all can thrive. Our path forward begins with Diversity, Democracy, and Humanity, three generative qualities that allow any society that embraces them to thrive.
Yet, few societies become places like this. That’s because there are actors among us who are working at cross-purposes with sustainability; less because they want us to fail and more due to three weaknesses we all, in varying degrees, share: an insatiable hunger for more (avarice); blinding fixations (myopia), and debilitating self-supremacy (hubris). These impulses are so strong that no matter where we are in history, and no matter our societal structure, when trouble comes, they continue to rush us headlong over the cliff. The test for you and me is whether our lives will contribute to the avoidance of this fate or to the sealing of it.
While this book is primarily about American society and our colorful history, so chock full of both successes and failures (as the adage goes, “write what you know”), this story is by no means the exclusive province of this country. In fact, much of what makes America “America” is only possible due to copious borrowing from so many other societies; both past and present, both with and without permission.
The goal is to set forth a set of ideas that, while rooted in the American story, have broader applicability, especially given that similar sociological shifts are occurring all over the world. But it is, at its heart, the story of us Americans; past, present and the future we choose. We’ll touch on the lives of extraordinary individuals who propelled us forward, as well as others who, believing in their own supremacy, pressed for their advantage at all costs, and in doing so, imperiled America herself.
There are consequences for letting our worst impulses go unchecked and unchallenged, ones that are more evident today than perhaps ever. Which leads us to America’s home-grown brand of social supremacy, one first manifest as slavery and Native displacement, before evolving into everything from racism to xenophobia. We’ll examine how this toxic ideology was crafted, and how it runs, like a fault line, through everything we’ve done, everything we’ve built, and everything we are. It’s the Frankenstein’s monster that we not only brought to life, but that we, by our choices, keep feeding.
The story itself pulls from a variety of sources, from the likes of writer James Baldwin to singer James Taylor, from Jesus to Rumi, and from presidents to those on the margins. But it’s the ideas most famously articulated by M.L.K., by Martin, which serve as this work’s foundation and its framing.
Finally, though parts history, analysis, and reflection, this book is, at its core, a story, an unfinished one that, together, we’re writing right now. It’s about our shared spiritual journey; who we can be at our best and who we have been at our worst, and about the “us” we are still becoming. It’s about the hope that, time and again, has grounded us; not the fingers-crossed, knock-on-wood variety that cynics mock or dismiss as naivete. It’s the weathered kind that, at every turn, has proven itself undeniable. The kind that undergirds our past, when our Founders declared “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all… are created equal.”
The kind that anchors us in the present, that compelled Bree Newsome, descendant of South Carolina slaves, to scale the flagpole on the grounds of the state capitol that still flew the Confederate battle flag and remove it, and that led Heather Heyer, an Anglo counter-protestor of a white nationalist rally to declare to the world, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Both were willing to risk their lives to ensure that today, “… indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” is far more than a pledge we recite. And it’s the kind that charters our future, invoked in that shared aspiration, “We, the people of the United States of America, in order to form a more perfect union...”
We’re picking up that story in the middle; right at this perilous place where we now find ourselves. Part One, The Beginning of the End is about our trajectory; from the Age of Promise, through the Age of Opportunism, to the Age of Recompense – our here and now.
We’ll explore how the culture we built (both revolutionary and reactionary) and choices we made (both kind and cruel), led us to this point, how our nation’s tectonic plates are shifting, and what that shifting requires of us. And we’ll get a sense of the vast diversity that made the United States itself possible, how this same diversity was penalized, subjugated, and, even eradicated, and of the corrosive constructs that pushed us in this direction.
Part Two, What a Fool Believes, delves into how otherwise flourishing societies become dysfunctional; locking themselves into iterative, accelerating processes of self-authored decline. This Degenerative Cycle (DGC) is comprised of Five AREAS; Alienation, Rationalization, Exploitation, Automation, Socialization, and back to Alienation. But with each revolution, there’s a bit less of all those things that make us, us. It’s what makes this an existential moment, every bit as critical as the Revolutionary or Civil War. Those before us may have decided who we are. But it rests with us to determine who we will be, what will become of us.
Which leads to Part Three, If You’re Out There, and to the Four Actions: Looking Deeper (Social Intelligence), Doing Better (Social Engagement), Drawing Closer (Social Cohesion), and Reaching Higher (Social Responsibility); or, in the language of my spiritual tradition, Wisdom, Justice, Kindness and Conscience; how each of us shapes the fate of all of us. If corrosive constructs and the DGC are how we ended up in the quicksand, the Actions are how we get out. We then return to our starting point, Diversity, Democracy and Humanity, the primal fires that, at the onset, forged us into a people. They might burn less fiercely in our chests, but they still burn, and as long as they do, both the dream and hope remains.
In the grand library chronicling the story of humankind, each person gets to write a sentence; each society a chapter. And herein lies our opportunity; to, individually and collectively, make our contribution, unequivocally, a good one. And it is in that sense that this is a revolutionary book. But the revolution is a personal one; each of us has the power to ensure that our generation meets this challenge, instead of being felled by it. But we can only do that by understanding how the society we’ve built is both beautiful and broken, by learning to celebrate the former and mend the latter, and by truly living up to our name – the United States of America. This is how we choose for ourselves a better destiny and chart for ourselves an enduring way forward.
--
PART I - THE BEGINNING OF THE END
1. All, Some and None
Trouble I’ve SeenNobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, nobody knows my sorrow. – American Negro Spiritual
Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward. – Book of Job 5:7
Between what might be, and what has been, this is the beginning; this is the beginning of the end. – Steve Moakler, Beginning of the End
We, the people, are in trouble. But for anyone who’s been paying attention, this isn’t exactly news. We might not fully grasp how we ended up here, or even agree on who’s to blame for us getting here. But if there’s one thing we Americans know, it’s how to spot trouble when we see it. But this isn’t the “same ole same ole” kind of trouble. It's the kind that President Lincoln was speaking of; the kind that no nation, no matter how powerfully conceived, no matter how deeply dedicated, can long endure. Still, this isn't the first time we've found ourselves in rough waters. Far from it. In fact, from the Revolution to the Civil War, from the Great Depression to the tumultuous 60s, from the oil crisis in the 80s to the 2009 financial collapse, from political gamesmanship to social injustice, we, the people, have more experience with unrest than we do with rest.
We’re a nation that has, even as we’ve prayed for peace, repeatedly declared war on itself. We've done it so often that we're no longer even sure that "United" States and "democracy" are still viable concepts. We extol the virtues of “liberty and justice for all”, but all too often, what we really mean is “some”. And “for some”, no matter the designated beneficiary, inevitably comes to mean one thing – none. That’s what’s most troubling about this trouble we’re now seeing; we miss how, not unlike with climate change, we’re complicit in our own suffering. Because societies start to die the day they determine that certain people don’t matter.
At the core of this is the cultural equivalent of a 9.0 earthquake – we’re changing in unprecedented ways, but lack the frameworks to survive this new reality. Take the idea of race, the lynchpin of American identity. Despite the European diaspora accounting for only 10% of humans alive today, and despite America’s lofty aspirations of equality at its founding, we’d invent racial whiteness out of whole cloth; essentially Anglicizing over 80 distinct people groups in the process.
We’d make legal whiteness a prerequisite for citizenship, then, use the group’s political power to build an American ruling class. But that time is over. We’re already more than a decade past the moment non-Anglo births surpassed Anglo births. In six years, that cohort starts reaching voting age, and in 20, we’ll be a nation with no demographic majority. And in that shift, we get to decide whether we’ll replace one form of self-supremacy with another, or abolish it altogether; allowing entirely new ways of relating to emerge.
Or, take religion, where we’ve gone from forced conversions during slavery to a time when those same groups are shrinking, and where our fastest-growing organized affiliation is “none”. Then, there’s our shifting understanding of both gender and sexuality. Today, 25% of Generation-Z identifies as non-straight (compared to 2.5% of Gen X) and the gender binary, increasingly abandoned – and that’s before getting to the massive majority that now sees marriage as a civil right. All three are examples of how constructs that once alienated the targeted are now isolating those who did the targeting.
Finally, there’s us as individuals. We’ve always known that we’re all different, that each of us is an “n” of one. That’s why some of us found it necessary to invent typologies; ones designed to ostensibly bring order to our world. But again, this is where we get it wrong. Those typologies were built to do the exact opposite of what we thought they did, and what we’ve been told that they do. They don't protect us from the “dangerous other”; they’re the mechanism by which the actual othering is done. They’re the tools that allow differentiated people to declare themselves the same, and in doing so, the new power. So, when supremacists say, "OUR RACE IS OUR NATION," they're essentially rewriting the Constitution; asserting that everywhere that refers to "nation" or “the people” is actually a reference to social whiteness, as defined by them.
Or, take militant religion. Since our 1954 push to include the phrase “under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance (incidentally, the same year as Brown v. Board of Education), we’ve been dead-set on declaring ourselves not only a Christian nation, but a particular kind of Christian; the kind that sanctioned slavery, consecrated segregation, and preached the gospel of racial superiority, the kind that believes that only issues impacting a segment of us matter.
But this isn’t just about our constructs or institutions, it’s about ourselves. The problem we’re facing is very much a spiritual one; increasingly evident in our inability to connect the dots between individual actions and collective outcomes, between the people we are and the society we have. We’re a nation suffering from three grievous wounds – allowing corrosive constructs to poison our culture (Part One), ignoring how taking advantage of some of us inevitably harms all of us (Part Two), and refusing to see how our individual actions shape our shared destiny (Part Three).
We Americans have embraced these malignant practices so thoroughly that, across the board, irrespective of politics or geography, ethnicity or ideology, they’ve become our new normal. But that’s entirely self-defeating. The only thing doubling down on human disregard can succeed at doing is accelerating our descent. We'll get into why tactics like these worked for a while (as well as why they were always doomed to fail) later. Most important here is understanding that they weren’t handed down from Mount Olympus or Sinai; they were constructed, and that hardly anything in this world is built, whether business or belief system, without an expected return on investment.
Which is why we, failing to grasp the severity of our situation, charged ahead; cannibalizing diversity, then, rewriting history to justify what we’d done to our societal kin. But what happens when the minorities are the new majority (or, as Bob Dylan put it, “the slow one will later be fast”)? Because it’s through our doing unto others that we teach others what’s acceptable to do unto us. So, yes, we've seen trouble before. But also not quite like this.
The actual words spoken by astronaut Jack Swigert were, "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here." And when those supporting the Apollo 13 mission heard them, they leapt into action. The question for those on the ground was not, "Who can we blame for this?" Nor was their focus on who would get credit. They weren't fixated on campaigning; convincing people to back their ideas – even if those ideas were the wrong ones.
It was all about solving the problem. Over these thirty-one chapters, that's our challenge; to revisit and learn from our social history, America's shared story. It's a sense-making endeavor; a delving into the workings of our own hearts, and how we choose a better destiny. The hope is, despite our continual history of so often rendering harm to get ahead, that we can prove that there's far more to us than that. Together, we can embrace a future that includes everyone in "we, the people" and that inspires each of us to “form a more perfect union”. But we only get there by understanding how we got here.
The work before us requires the challenging of an assumption that most of us carry; that there are individuals, and even entire groups, who we believe to be inferior or disposable, worthless or irredeemable, that we’d all be better off without. Or, put another way, the reason they do evil is because they're evil; the reason we do evil is because we made a mistake.
But even the most cursory examination of human nature reveals hearts that are capable of both; people who perpetrate the worst crimes against humanity – who commit genocide, or enslave others, who poison children's drinking water or steal old people's retirement – even they have people they love, and whom they’d lay down their lives for. They're not just cardboard villains. They have dreams. They've committed selfless acts of true kindness. Humanity lives in them just as it does in us. It was Marvin Gaye who sang, "We're all sensitive people, with so much to give." And he was right.
So, if humanity is our factory setting, and if we, and the arc of the moral universe "bends toward justice", how did we end up here? That's the question, along with what we do about it, that led to this book. Matt Damon's character, Mark Watney, in the film, The Martian, said: "At some point, everything's gonna go south on you and you're going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem and you solve the next one, and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home." That's also how a nation endures.
Life on the Ground – So Little Time
So little time. Try to understand that I'm – trying to make a move just to stay in the game; I try to stay awake and remember my name. Oh, everybody's changing, and I don't feel the same. – Keane, Everybody’s Changing
Remember when we thought we never would survive? But now, neither one of us is breaking. – Roberta Flack, Making Love
As much as perhaps anyone I’ve ever met, Nick Porcelli epitomized diversity and all that’s great about it. I met Nick my third year in New York at a dinner party hosted by a friend from Columbia University. As my friend predicted, Nick and I had much in common, both with respect to life experiences and interests.
It was one of those meets where instantly you’re old friends. A combination of Jewish, Italian and Cuban heritage, with the good looks of all three, Nick was a striking figure. Women (and men) constantly flirted with him, and he graciously let them know that he was happily married. “But if I wasn’t…” he’d always add, with a wink that made them blush and sent them on their way, feeling a bit better about themselves. Nick grew up in Chicago’s foster care system and, at eighteen, was out on his own with nothing but his wits and determination to carry him.
And carry him, they did. Through night classes and college, through work as a hospital orderly during the day, and through a range of administration jobs that would ultimately land him as a chief administrator at one of the world’s most prestigious law firms. Nick and his wife would adopt his sister’s two children when they were little more than newborns, and together, they would shower their daughter and son with all the unconditional love and sense of security that Nick’s own growing up lacked.
When he and I got to be friends, he was living and working in NYC during the week and commuting back home to Chicago on weekends. He lived in a tiny (normal, by New York standards) studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen that was warmly decorated and, every time I saw it, absolutely immaculate. Every suit hang the same direction and every shirt, tie and pair of shoes had its place. He also never knew a stranger. I remember on one of his trips back from Chicago, he saw a woman who he thought looked like Roberta Flack seated on the plane. I’d always been a fan, having heard my Aunt Pat, only a decade older than me, listening to her music.
But it was after watching the film, Making Love, and being stunned by her tender delivery of the theme song, that I started collecting all things Roberta. Nick, remembering this, went over and asked this woman if she was Roberta, and when he found out she was, he told her, “I just wanted you to know that my friend loves you and still plays your music all the time.” He came back with an autograph that said, “To Rodney, I understand you’re one of my biggest fans. Thank you. Love, Roberta.”
Nick did everything with purpose. Though I was a couple inches taller, I had to work to keep up with his long strides as we wove our way through busy New York City pedestrian traffic, everyone in a hurry. But then, suddenly, Nick would stop and have a conversation with the homeless veteran on the corner. He knew the man’s name and Nick, shined shoes and handkerchief in pocket, took a moment to acknowledge this man as a human being. “I’ll bring you a plate on my way back,” Nick would say, as we headed out to eat. And he always did.
Nick helped everyone, and he had a real soft spot for the elderly. His life in New York was like a Woody Allen film – full of wonderfully human, undeniably lovable characters; a brilliant intellectual who’d spent most his life in a wheelchair, a middle-aged woman bravely facing down a grave illness, a former Rockette who, though her glory days were behind her, was still a beauty, and so many others, of every ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age imaginable, from exceedingly wealthy to financially destitute.
On the floor of the apartment where I lived was a lovely elderly woman named Sylvia. Whenever she went out, even to the store, she was dressed impeccably. With her lace-trimmed dresses and waistcoat, her gloved hands and pillbox hat, she looked like she was heading out to have tea with Jackie Onassis. Nick saw her out collecting cans one day and mentioned it to me. The next time he came to visit, he insisted that we put together a care package for her with, among other things, bath salts, chocolates, fresh fruit, a bouquet of roses, and $50 he put in an envelope. We arranged it all in a basket and left it secretly by her door.
As my friend, Nick believed in me unequivocally. He’d tell me, “You’re going to change the world, you know that?” and because he believed it, in that moment, I would. Over the years, I’d draw down on this trust more times than I can count. Nick would die suddenly and unexpectedly at just 42 years of age, in 2011, and like the jagged cut it was, the wound of his loss has been slow to heal. But I wouldn’t trade the opportunity to have known him for anything.
You know how we sometimes get stuck on an album, listening to it over and over? For him, that was Keane’s debut release, Hopes and Fears. I remember him playing it, on infinite loop, in his apartment. The fifth song on that album was Everybody’s Changing, and once when it was playing, he volunteered that it was his favorite song. I never asked why and he never elaborated. I think, in part, because it felt like such a vulnerable admission, and partly because it made sense to me. Nick had been making moves to “stay in the game” his entire life, while at the same time, trying to stay awake and remember not just his own name, but those of everyone he’d meet.
Today, when I hear it, or even think of it, I cannot help but also think of my friend Nick. “So little time,” the singer sang; a sentiment that expresses so much of what comes to mind when I think of him – both how little time I’d have him in my life, and how cognizant he was of how little time any of us has. So, Nick lived more fully, more deeply, into every single moment. He savored food, and conversation, and experiences. He took his family on vacation while he could. He extended his hand and walked this earth like every person – no matter how wealthy or poor – was his equal, and he, theirs. Nick savored life.
As a result, Nick’s favorite song has taken on a broader meaning; not just about his life, but all our lives. Increasingly, it reminds me of the reality of change – a truth that Nick’s own life had made him so aware of – and why he lived his life the way he did. Everybody is changing. And if I carry within me one lesson learned from the privilege of having known Nick Porcelli and watching how he lived, it is this: for each of us, our highest and most sacred work is embracing those around us in two equally important ways – celebrating the person they’re in the process of becoming, and cherishing the person they’ve always been.
We’ve Only Just Begun
I still do believe in the bigger table, but it’s more difficult than ever to keep that faith, probably because the resistance to it is so great. We have to be the resistance to that resistance. – Pastor John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table
The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and danger. The world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity - or it will move apart. – President Franklin D. Roosevelt
“This isn’t the world you wanted,” said Jerome to Charlotte in Westworld’s series finale, “But it’s the world you built”. This quote not only reflects a key insight about the power of human agency, but for me, personally, it speaks to one of my most fervent hopes; that somehow, together, we’ll prove ourselves to be a people whose best days still lie ahead of us. But right now, that’s not the future we’re necessarily creating. Everything from our toxic social climate to our troubled political processes reveals how while this might not be the world we Americans wanted, it’s the one that we, by lives lived and actions taken, have built.
This was a realization we began having as far back as the 60s, when Governor Wallace, backed by supporters, used his body to prevent University of Alabama’s integration, when live television beamed images of children swept down the streets of downtown Birmingham by fire hoses, and when Troopers charged their horses into marchers on the Edmond Pettus Bridge.
The sheer violence brought us face-to-face with the pain of our societal kin, and with our complicity in it. And in doing so, it deprived us of the ability to continue telling ourselves that all was OK. But that’s a tough place to be, so we rewrote the story to be about our dividedness. Instead of victim and attacker, it’s the Hatfields and McCoys; with both parties equally to blame. We couldn’t allow ourselves to see how by hurting them, we’d harmed ourselves, and that same denial made it impossible to fully address the problems our own actions created.
Fast-forward sixty years, and here we are, still talking about our dividedness just like we did back then; like it’s new, sudden, and has nothing to do with our behavior. But the thing is, not only is this narrative false, it isn’t actually new. We’ve been fighting against our better angels since the onset of the Revolution itself, and despite our name, uniting has never been our strong suit. But at our beginning, our hopes burned so much brighter.
All social entities, whether communities or congregations, book clubs or bowling leagues, corporations or civilizations, start out brimming with possibility. “So many roads to choose,” the Carpenters sang in their 70s wedding classic. “We start out walking and learn to run, and yes, we've just begun.” These communities we form and societies we create are buoyed by hope and held aloft by the dreams that called them forth. And that’s where they could remain, thriving and becoming in this Age of Promise.
But they rarely stay there for long. Something about our fear of both growth and change tends to foster counter-sustainability among us. The same unknowns that once inspired us become overwhelming. We begin to act out in ways that diminish hopes and sever ties. The roads from which we can choose are fewer and we tire of running. We become realists, pragmatists and cynics. We start to expect less from ourselves and believe the worst in others. And that heralds, for any society, the beginning of the end.
Societies, like everything else, exist in perpetual states of dynamism. The question is not whether they’ll face challenges that could be their undoing. They will, many times over. Whether confronted by rivals, impacted by disease, visited by catastrophe or simply worn down by the sum of their own choices, one thing human history proves is that any society that refuses to change is one that won’t last. “So little time” could just as easily be applied to nations as individuals.
And that’s where things get particularly tough. Because, America, like all societies, exists by agreement. Everything from our borders to our determination of who is, and who is not, one of us, is real because we agree that it is. That’s what makes this particular crossing so perilous. We don’t have the hindsight that our posterity, those who will look back and tell our story, will have. What awaits us on the other side of any threshold is unknown. Because it’s not just everybody, as Nick reminded us, who’s changing; but everything; all of existence is both inherently the same and simultaneously becoming something different.
The people that emerges from its crucible will, by definition, be different from the one that entered. But like the butterfly is to the caterpillar, they will also be the same. In that moment of existential crisis, societies either go extinct, or they find that they’ve already developed within them the ability to author their own transformation; emerging as something simultaneously the same and different, and at the same time, better. All of which leads to a question: What if the inevitable demise of society, isn’t? What if the very reason they end is because they insist on never changing?
What if what happens next isn’t already written, and that we’re penning it right now – by what we do today? And what if, by embracing certain traits that counteract our own worst tendencies and by committing to the work of forming a more perfect union, a land made for both you and me, we can create societies that adapt, evolve, reinvent themselves, thrive and ultimately, sustain – remaining perpetually in the Age of Promise? We could.
One last thing to remember about societies is that they live because the people who are part of them, believe. We infuse them with love, imbue them with life and nurture them. We sacrifice for their well-being and rally to their defense. We create their institutions and infrastructure and entrust them to act on our behalf. And because we believe, we’re bound to and care deeply for the members of our societal family; both individually and as a collective.
When those same people stop believing, those societies begin to die.
--
- Get a full copy of This Land Is Your Land -
- Back to HOME -