If you're discouraged ...
I would encourage you to visit with Heather McGhee a while. If your time is tight, at least sit with her through her last two chapters of The Sum of Us. Whenever Rachel or Chris or Lawrence have endorsed a book,
-- and McGhee's was one -- they have never failed to pass on solid knowledge that helps us rebuild the body politic.
To paraphrase Dr. King and Heather McGhee, the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice. But we know our progress has not been guaranteed. When the arc in America bends
-- from slavery in the 1860's and returns to convict leasing in the 1880''s;
-- when it bends from Jim Crow in the 60's and returns to mass incarceration in the 70's,
-- when it bends from indigenous genocide to an epidemic of Indigenous suicides
We finally learn that as it bends, only to sway back, we now have to come to realize, and admit, that we have not touched the root.
Because the laws, rulings and enforcements we make are expressions of a root belief.
Now it is time to face the nation's most deep-seated belief, the great lie at the root of our nation's founding -- the belief in the hierarchy of human value.
We are still there.
And so, at this moment, the process we're going through is challenging us to finally settle this question:
Who is an American, and who are we to one another?"
It is a question harder for us than for most other countries, because we are the world's most radical experiment in democracy -- we're in a nation of ancestral strangers that has to work to find connection, even as we grow more diverse every day. The hardest question has taken us the longest to answer. And so, yes, we feel discouraged right now. We want to "get there."
But everything depends on the answer. Politics offers two visions of why all the people of the world have met here:
one in which we are nothing more than competitors (the corporate vision set up by European monarchial hierarchal societies), and
another in which the proximity of so much difference forces us to admit our common humanity.
The choice has never been starker. As the nation is viscerally anxious about who belongs, many in power -- you know, the crazy class of billionaires that run Trumpublicans' message machine -- have made it their overarching goal to sow distrust about the goodness of the Other. Right now they are hair-on-fire holding to their tiny idea of We the People, denying what WE are becoming. They megaphone their warning that demographic changes are the unmaking of America, making us (as one of their mouthpieces, Tucker, says) "poorer, dirtier, and more divided."
But what we common sense Americans know, even gripped with anxiety and frustration, is that that their threat is our nation's salvation. Because when a nation founded on racial hierarchy truly rejects that root belief, then and only then will we have discovered a New World. To make that New World manifest we must live our lives in solidarity across color, gender, origin and class by demanding changes to the 'rules' that disrupt the very notion that those with wealth are worth more than us in a democracy.
Since the nation's founding we have not allowed diversity to be our official superpower, but when we have occasionally blasted past the divide and conquer messaging and structures set up by the Koch class, we have seen that America is more than the sum of its disparate parts.
Joe Biden's saving the soul of America is about emerging from these crises with new roots, a new birth rooted in the knowledge that WE are so much more than the original 'we' in the founders' "We the People," which was just some of us. Biden, and we who manifest solidarity, bring forth a whole new meaning for Building Back Better.
Our new WE will be the soul of America -- greater, richer, because it is the new sum of us.