Because America Needs Us. That's Why

It's not her, it's them. America is being held captive. She is not the enemy.

Photo by Jeff Burak on Unsplash

When we talk about America these days, even those of us who care enough to want to save her, we have to make sure we get to her flaws early enough so we’re not looking like mindless cheerleaders for a team that clearly doesn’t deserve us.

Oh, god, no! We mustn’t be fans or even friends. We can say “I love my country”, but then we must be quick with the “but…” before we’re laughed at or dismissed as too naive to be believed.

We’re in a fascistic pickle at the moment, so close to losing what’s left of what we used to call ‘democracy’ we can barely find the words to define us. But we’re still required to call out America’s faults, as if we deserve what’s happening to us and we’ll need to do penance before we can work up the effort to do anything about it.

• Trump is all our fault. If we had only…

• The Democrats brought this on themselves by…

• The Democrats brought this on themselves by not…

• We should have known our laws and our constitution wouldn’t save us…

• In the end, we deserve this…

• I’m not voting for any of them…

• We need to let it die and start all over again.

America is not just a country. It’s not a political entity, though everything that matters boils down to politics. It’s not a constitution or a declaration or a flag. It’s not our enemy any more than it is our savior. It’s a body of land surrounded by borders both natural and designated. We’ve formed 50 states so far and we call them “United States”, though that’s not true, either. We’re not united in the sense that we look out for each other’s best interests. We look out for our own, either in accordance with a central government or in battle against them, depending on where we are in our own spaces and on history’s timeline.

“America” is the concept we’ve devised to give human meaning to our country, each side becoming the true “America” when the question arises about who is more entitled to the title. “The American people” is the subject for both sides, and both sides think they have a handle on what being an American means.

We use “United States” when we’re talking about the country as an entity. Without emotion. But it’s “America” that keeps it personal. “We, the people” is wholly American. They’re the first words of our constitution, writ large so we won’t forget.

Photo by Anthony Garand on Unsplash

Yet we do forget. We’re a divided nation now. Fully half of us claim to cherish our country, even more so as we watch the other half tear it apart, the concept of “a more perfect union” gone by the wayside as they work to destroy everything our constitution promised in order to erase a government that threatens what they see as their right to pillage and plunder without the inconvenience of rules or laws.

We’re still stunned by the audacity of it, even after all these years. We have to believe this is an anomaly, something weird and strange and wholly un-American. And it is. It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before, and our first inclination, some 10 years ago, was to insist it couldn’t happen. Nothing prepared us for this. Then the propaganda started: we deserve this. As a country we’ve been more rotten than we like to admit. Let us count the ways…

Whole classes of people have suffered because the United States couldn’t get its act together, couldn’t be nice, couldn’t live up to the promise of the Preamble, and has never adhered to a constitution we like to think we use as the be-all, end-all to every legal argument.

The cracks our people fall through are deep and vast and without safety nets. Nobody actually lives the American dream. Everyone has suffered because they live here. We’re behind in everything—wages, health care, education, the environment. We’ve sold our souls to the almighty dollar. Our courts are a mess. We’d rather incarcerate than rehabilitate. Our melting pot has disappeared and in its place is hardened steel. Our middle class is poor now. We can’t afford to be sick. We don’t even know how to vote right. We’ve become the awful country we used to monitor along with the rest of the civilized world.

Yet America lives. In our hearts and in our minds we insist there is an America where we’ll all fit in, where we’ll find happiness and fulfillment, where the beauty of our surroundings will match the ease with which we’ll live our daily lives. We insist there is an America where we won’t go on hurting each other. And we keep trying.

Sunset, Lake Michigan. Author’s photo

In the end, we are America. We, the people. We hold our future in our hands, and if enough of us see building and nurturing our country as a responsibility, we will come through this, not only because we must but because we’ll want to. We have a stake in what happens here. We have an obligation to the generations ahead. We have an obligation to those who worked before us to try and get it right. We have an obligation to ourselves.

We deserve a better America. We’ve worked for it and we’ve earned it, but more than that, we’re entitled to a better America. We’re a still-young country full of promise, full of pride, full of stubborn people who never will become the victims of the current regime—or any other like it.

And we’re not alone. There are millions of us. Many millions.

If we need reminding now and then, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll remind each other of our worth, of our obligations, of our capacity for resistance and for lasting justice. And then we’ll get back to work. Because that’s what real Americans have always done. Those parts of our America that we’re grieving over now? They’re the parts real Americans built. Remember who they were. They were the original “We, the People”. They are our heritage. We are their firekeepers.

Constant Commoner revolves around my thoughts as a woman who has aged and grown and learned by a process that feels miraculous considering I have no formal education or unique abilities. We the people are all commoners. We believe based on our own past and our own feelings. We choose a path we can live with and if we’re lucky we get to share our lives with people who care, who understand.

That’s what I aim to do here. I want to build a community where anyone can come and sit on our porch and grow along with the rest of us. No paywalls, everyone is included. The comment sections get lively, thanks to those readers who enjoy sharing here. I hope you’ll join us.

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