The Two Americas

I remember saluting the flag and pledging allegiance at the beginning of each and every school day of my childhood…one nation, under God, indivisible. The mythos of my generation’s growing up was that we are a unified nation, one people, with a single-minded purpose, and all connected by God. Nice try! That all started unravelling for me during the protests against the Viet Nam War. The millions of us who took to the streets or took to the hills felt alienated from this supposed unified America. Turns out, in spite of all the wishful thinking to the contrary, America has never really been “one nation.” And what we are witnessing today, in the era of Trump, is not a new creation by a demented, narcissistic, self-aggrandizing, conspiracy seeking, truth-defying, law breaking President. Rather, it is the uncovering and unleashing of the dark underside of the American consciousness that has been there since the very beginning.

The America I want to believe in is the one enshrined in the highest values of our founding documents—a beacon of democracy and freedom for the world. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is the America to which the world looked as a land of opportunity, a place that welcomes the world’s “huddled masses, tired and poor,” assuring them that if they worked hard, they and their children after them could achieve anything. I am a product of this promise. My grandparents came to this country with little more than the clothes on their backs. Speaking no English, they worked hard, saved their money, brought all of their siblings to these shores, and witnessed their grandchildren and greatgrandchildren become teachers, lawyers, business owners, PhD’s, doctors, authors, even a rabbi. Thank you America!

But there is another reality which we generally like to forget, ignore, or not even acknowledge. Nevertheless, it has been there since our very first days. Though we have witnessed amazing progress across multiple realms of society, it persists and we deny it at our peril.

The roots of America are planted in white male privilege which saw the almost complete genocide of the indigenous people of the First Nations. This was quickly followed by the brutal enslavement of millions of Africans, justified by the racist doctrines of “manifest destiny” and the “white man’s burden” as well as the selective misinterpretation of the Bible. From the very beginning, the deep political divide in this country was clear—those who argued for a strong Federalist government that would guarantee equanimity of rights versus the independent States that would rely on so-called “don’t tread on me” individual freedom. This division ultimately led to one of the bloodiest Civil Wars in human history and though the proponents of unity won, the division has persisted and continues to rear its ugly head on a fairly regular basis. Whether it is anti-immigrant quotas; discrimination against Catholics and Jews; the reluctance to enter either of the two world wars; the incarceration of Japanese citizens during WW II; racism; McCarthyism; white nationalism; the Ku Klux Klan; homophobia; misogyny; armed militias; domestic terrorism; NRA sponsored proliferation of weapons under the thinly veiled Second Amendment right to bear arms; or now the fringe Alt Right, this sentiment and the ugly hatred it promotes persists as part of the very fabric which is America.

Whenever there is disruption or rapid change in a community or a society, inevitably, a feeling of loss or fear will be provoked in some. Now think of the posture of fear—crouching, hiding, which makes us small. When we are small the so-called negative emotions take over. Fear leads to anger, anger to hate, hate to hateful speech, hateful speech to hateful action. The so-called “browning of America” with demographic predictions that “whites” will be a minority in America by the year 2040, has been the spark for this latest round of regression, an “us” against them” mentality in America. That, coupled with the growth in women’s power, full inclusion of those in the LGBTQ community, and an economy which is truly global, and we have a recipe for those feeling that they are being left behind and excluded to strike out. Hence the uptick in gun violence; hate mongering; anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, and racist acts; a movement to overturn Roe v, Wade; and desire for isolation. America first is code for America alone. And our President has unleashed and given cover to all of it.

In Judaism we recognize that the world as we know it exists in duality—yetzer ha-tov and yetzer ha-rah/the inclination towards goodness and the inclination towards selfishness. These two forces do battle within each and every human being as well. Though I firmly believe that the world is inexorably moving toward the good, I know that it is always a dance—two steps forward and one step back. In this moment of backward movement, we must hold each other tight and not lose hope, creating a future that will embrace us all.