Our American Pain
It takes courage to find gratitude. It takes gratitude to find courage. Breathe.
This election was governed by fear. People saw a choice between “Democrats” who would cut down the nature of our democracy and “Republicans” who would cut down the nature of our republic, each to raise up their own commercial enterprises. Like a mall built atop a grove, the very names of our political parties tell us what they would subvert to replace. This is American policy and legislation as goods for sale; a government that sells Pepsi or Coke for plutocrats. Same flavor, just packaged either in red or in blue.
The 2020s were always going to be a time of 20/20 vision where the lights in the malls of America would turn on and people would begin to see clearly what is being sold.
Take a long look at our American pain. There it is in the awakening to how deeply and often we, its people, have been lied to. There’s a story of stone built around the heart of our commons: to cut down a forest and raise up a mall named after the nature over which it’s been paved. A place where people once walked free becomes a place where admission comes with the expectation to pay. So it is that, conditioned by the malls of America, the voting public’s eyes have opened to a government whose nature has been commercialized and replaced.
The left called it “Woke”. The right called it “The Great Awakening”. They’re different names for the same revelation. “I can’t breathe” cried one side in anger over the knee that choked a brother’s neck. “I can’t breathe” cried the other side in anger over the masks mandated over their mouths. “I can’t breathe” cried the patients dying of disease. “I can’t breathe” cried a nation despondent for lack of opportunity. Gasping for air, jumping out of sleep, all Americans separately cried together the same words for the same feeling. The division is the diversion that tries to suffocate the unity of Americans collectively waking up from the “American Dream”.
The great achievement of this political era has been equal access to prejudice. All of us, regardless of race, religion, color, or creed can be judged by the contempt of our caricature. This is the aching heart of our American pain. This is why all Americans have cried out at one time, the same simple phrase for a mythically complex feeling, “I can’t breathe”.
We are a nation drowning in shame. We are in that shame together, even if you might feel you are drowning alone. That sense of separation is shame’s greatest lie.
Looking back with 20/20 vision, I remember the culture that raised me as a teen. Our parents would drop us off at a mall named after a pond. Inside, we’d wind our way through a maze of commodified culture lined with retailers whose finances were managed by Jeffrey Epstein, listening to music made by P Diddy, on our way to watch movies made by Harvey Weinstein. We were kids held captive by a culture manufactured by adults who traded in sex and human trafficking. We laughed along when they suggested we stick our dicks in American Pie. Then we took our naivety from the mazes of malls to the mazes online, sharing breadcrumbs of our confusion with algorithms that tracked everything. We learned to cancel each other with the mounting evidence of each of our complicitness in a culture that, like the abusers who shaped it, uses shame to control people. Who among us can claim the high ground of virtue when our original sin was to be children raised in a culture like this? We bought it because it was sold to us before we even got our first paychecks.
Shame is the defender of lies, twisted and twisting you with self-hatred until you comply. Shame makes it easier for men to hate. Shame makes it harder for boys to cry. Shame silences women. Shame turns girls on each other like spies. Shame is the offender of truth that would rather we deal punishment than forgiveness. Shame wins by mutually-assured self-destruction. Shame loses by the courage to mutually reconcile.
Reconciliation can not be given to a people by its leaders. Reconciliation can only be given to each other; people to people, one nation, under the shared capture of lies. Could we also become complicit in our own salvation? How do we break free from the prison of shame made in the maze of these malls of America and the labyrinthine algorithms that bind us online? The harder we struggle, the deeper we fall so what else is there to do than to let go by forgiving ourselves and each other? The medicine is in the knowing that you, in your deepest vulnerability, are connected with others. You are not alone.
The walls that divide us are built over the soil of our deeper nature. So let’s dig our way out.
I share this reflection at the time of Thanksgiving, which holds a story that, like all else, has been distorted by the shame of this political era’s culture wars that would rather you focus on how people hurt each other than help. Underneath the story of division and hatred, is a lesson of reconciliation taught by the soil of this land and shared freely as a plant gives its fruit. The heart of the story of Thanksgiving is the giving of this lesson to the pilgrims by an indigenous man named Tisquantum (also known as Squanto) in spite of his suffering caused by people much like them. The pilgrims were lost, starving, dying against the winter until Tisquantum taught them how to grow food on this land. They met each, in spite of violent differences, in a shared vulnerability greater than the insults their people had hurled at each other. We would do well to remember this teaching today.
Tisquantum taught a thousands of years old method of permaculture called ‘The Three Sisters’ that involves the planting together of corn, beans and squash. Each plant has its own way of life and its own season. Each plant nourishes each other reciprocally not in-spite of, but because of their differences. The corn stands tall to provide scaffolding for the bean’s vines. The beans bring nitrogen to fertilize the roots. The leaves of the squash provide shade to protect the soil. One stands tall. One nurtures. One protects. Whatever you carry with you to your Thanksgiving table about the American story, this is the truth in the soil on which people here have survived through all its seasons. This is how we reconcile.
The gathering for a meal after harvest and before winter is a deeper tradition of holy days that has been made sacred by humans of nearly all traditions. The culture of shame aching at the heart of our American pain has twisted this natural gathering into a battleground, even a joke, where people are expecting to fight over political party lines. How many of you have been told how to prepare to argue with your drunk uncle? Have you ever really asked why he drinks? How many of you have been told to dismiss your transitioning niece? Have you ever really asked from what they’re trying to escape? Your family and friends across America are in pain. What are you going to do about it?
It used to be called, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, that false flavoring Americans would pass around the dinner table. Better today would be, Who Told You This Was Butter (as Meow Wolf cleverly made). Ask yourself this when you pull up to your Thanksgiving table: Who told you to bring the flavor of hate? And who wins when you do?
The richest tasting American Pie is humble, buttered with a flavor of warm safety that leaves no room for shame. Share a slice with your friends and family and come prepared not to fight, but to reconcile. Specifically, dig underneath the walls built around you by a culture of shame. Offer your vulnerability first. Instead of talking points given to you by a political think tank, bring with you the ways you have realized you have been lied to, because you have. That makes you an American. That’s why we love you.
Whether you call it woke or an awakening; whether you feel this country has won or has lost; when you come to the table this year to give thanks for what you are grateful for…you can breathe. Be courageous in finding your gratitude. Give thanks to the lessons you’ve learned from how you’ve been wronged. See what your vulnerability opens up amongst your friends, your family, your community, your country.