I Went to All 50 States to Find America’s Heart
I found something else instead
We were supposed to be better than this.
The lie Americans have fed themselves, generation after generation, is that we are better than this. Than everyone else, out there in a brutal, uncivilized world. America does not allow itself to be led by fear. We answer injustice with justice. We move forward, working for a better world for our children.
It was always a lie. From the days of rounding up Native Americans and butchering them as we forced them from their homes, to the denial of the rights of property, the vote, and even life for African-Americans, to the systematic redistribution of wealth back to 1 percent of the American people, it has never been true that Americans are inherently a just, kind people. But I remember, growing up in the 1990s and 2000s, feeling that we would work to transform it into truth. We would allow ourselves to feel shame on a national level when our leaders were revealed as corrupt, racist, sexual harassing goons. We would strive to do better.
This strikes me now as the thought of someone catastrophically young and naïve.
The people who cry out that they have been left behind have in reality merely found themselves forced into the ranks of the people they insisted be left behind…
