AMERICA, IF YOU READ ALL THE WAY TO THIS point in the book, I know you’ve been through a lot. (If you just skipped ahead to this section however, go back to the start, you lazy bum!)
I know that reading parts of this book may have been stressful (but certainly not as aggravating as the 2016 presidential campaign that you survived, barely.)
America, I hereby give you permission to take a short break. Relax a bit. Take a breath. Wind down. Reflect.
(Pause.)
Ah, feel better?
Good, now let me give you one last pep talk.
Let me remind you that we’ve gotten through times far darker than these—slavery, moves to crush the suffragette movement, the internment of Japanese Americans, state-sponsored violence against unions, World War II, rampant child labor, segregation, the Depression, the McCarthy Era, and on and on. But our nation collectively overcame those stains on our history by banding together to fight for justice.
Also remember that basic human hope can never be fully extinguished. When I am blue on a particularly cold and dark morning in January, I always remind myself that, while the next day may or may not be any warmer, I am guaranteed (in the northern hemisphere) that the next day’s sunrise will be just a bit earlier and the sunset just a bit later. That’s hope. We can always find some bright side, somewhere.
But if that bit of encouragement doesn’t help you—if you are still despondent about the human condition—then do what I do when I’m particularly down on the human race: I listen to some of the finest music ever produced. Two suggestions: Miles Davis’s The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965a and Johannes Brahms’s The Two Cello Sonatas performed by Jacqueline du Pre and Daniel Barenboim. Angels, on their best days, wish they could sound this heavenly.
Those classics should immediately comfort you because they just sound so damn good. (If you can’t smile listening to them, then I don’t know what to tell you, except perhaps try some laughing gas.) But beyond the immediate pleasure of experiencing such timeless classics, think about what those albums represent: that human beings are capable of making works of art that are not only otherworldly in their beauty but reflective of supreme humanity. Always remember that the same human race that is capable of writing Mein Kampf is also capable of creating one of Monet’s water lily paintings.
For every Hitler, there is a Sophie Scholl, who, as a German dissident opposing him, knowingly gave her life for other people’s freedom. Even when some humans show the world their darkest side, we can always find some inspiring, heroic behavior elsewhere.
What makes the difference between a government that, facing a Depression, chooses to create concentration camps to execute its citizens quickly and efficiently, versus a different government that, facing a similar economic meltdown, chooses to create Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps that gave the most destitute citizens food, clothing, shelter, and life-affirming, productive work?
The difference between those two governments is you. The difference is us. The difference is the character of our nation and its people.
When most regular Germans voted, spoke up, and marched, they did so for Nazism. When most Americans did, we did so for the New Deal.
Don’t look for someone else to be your villain or savior. You, I, and everyone around us are America, and we make the difference, for good or bad. We can either ignore America’s problems, blame them on others, and then take false comfort in claiming we’re powerless—or we can take some action, big or small, to get our government and society back on track in a humane, sensible direction.
Auschwitz or a CCC camp? The choice is ours.
Those are the stakes.
We must always remember that there is never a right time to do the wrong thing, and never a wrong time to do the right thing. We must know that good citizenship can never be outsourced. When people ask me why I am so passionate about social change, I have a simple response: “Why isn’t everybody?”
When I suggest to fellow Americans, as I am doing now, that they have a responsibility to take some or all of the steps necessary to be a Citizen Patriot, they often demur, saying that it’s just too much work, that it’s just too futile, that it’s just too hard to influence elected officials. Give me a friggin’ break. Whoever says that just doesn’t know hard.
Hard is landing at a Normandy Beach under ferocious machine gun and mortar fire. Hard is marching for civil rights over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma while being viciously clubbed.b Hard is looking into your daughter’s eyes and having to tell her you don’t have any food that night for dinner.
Get over yourself, America, and get to work fixing our country and world. Taking five minutes to contact your elected officials isn’t hard—it’s damn easy, as are most of the other steps I’ve suggested.
Now, America: you know, deep in your heart, that the way the right wing defines “American exceptionalism”—that each and every facet of America is simply better than each and every aspect of every other country and that God personally wants America to rule the world—is just bunk. But you also know, America, that we are an exceptional country.
Yeah, a lot is wrong with us, America, about which I’ve spent a few hundred pages complaining. But a lot is still right with us, too. Let’s all of us, our nation and each resident, build upon our greatest strengths—diversity; freedom of speech, press, and religion; openness; free elections; and idealism—in order to build a more perfect union.
In other world capitals, citizens worship at the tombs of dead leaders. In Moscow, residents line up to view the burial place of Lenin. In Beijing, many pay tribute at the mausoleum of Chairman Mao. Even in Paris, in the heart of a democracy, the French pay their respects to the coffins (there are many, nestled within each other) of Emperor Napoleon. Yet while Washington, DC is filled with monuments to presidents, not a single president is actually buried there. Rather, when people wait in a line to worship our civic culture in our nation’s capital, they go to the National Archives to see the original Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and Bill of Rights, documents that proclaim the ideal of American freedom. We don’t always live up to that ideal, but we still celebrate it, and remembering that ideal occasionally jolts us to try harder to reach it. That’s what’s exceptional about us, America, and don’t you forget it.
I once met a Somali refugee in Sweden who had a brother living in Washington, DC. I asked him in which country he’d prefer to live and he said, “America, of course.” I pressed him: “Don’t you get more government support in Sweden than your brother gets in America?” “Yes,” he responded, “but I never feel like I am at home in Sweden—my brother feels like he belongs in the United States.” America, let’s be proud that we are still one of the most welcoming countries on the globe. No matter how the Trumps and Cruzes angrily rant and rave, most of us still want to fully embrace those who still need a safe place to stay.
America, let’s remember that day on February 25, 1923, when New York’s harbor was clogged with ice, when my mother, Bejla, two months old, was carried off the S.S. Minnekahda and into Ellis Island, to freedom, and eventually, to a good life for her family.
Of course you remember that, America. We were all there. Don’t we want that freedom, don’t we want that good life, for everybody? Of course we do.
Let’s stay together and let’s make this work—for everyone, America.
Are you on board? Are you all in?
(America exuberantly nods.)
Excellent, I’m relieved and overjoyed.
Yes, I am still in love with you, America.
You don’t have to sleep on the couch anymore.
Come give me—and all 523 million Americans—a big hug.
a The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965 features Miles Davis on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Tony Williams on drums—musical geniuses all. That’s an even greater line-up than the 1927 Yankees. (I threw in that last Yankees reference for my friend, the great Jonathan Eig—brilliant author of the definitive bios of Lou Gehrig, Al Capone, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, and—for variety—Gregory Goodwin Pincus, the inventor of the birth control pill.)
b Next time you whine that it’s just too hard for you to take the time to vote, remember Selma.
