Not belongings, but belonging.
Peer through the slats of the white picket fence and beyond the two-car garage to read Emma Lazarus’ poem, inscribed on the Statue of Liberty’s bronze plaque: “her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome.”
A lovely dream, indeed. Worldwide welcome.
We can argue that it has never been true, that it has been pantomimed on stolen land, constructed with stolen lives.
Yes. And.
Here we are, in America, the most mongrel of nations, the land of beautiful, scrappy-ass mutts.
Human confusion around belonging is perennial and painful. We harbor an ache of exile, a delusion that we no longer belong. Those who founded this nation came from a tradition that explains it like this: we were expelled from the Garden. In this telling, knowledge was the reason for our banishment, and we continue to imagine that our big brains make us essentially different, set us apart from the rest of life.
The truth — a truth that should be self-evident, but somehow mostly isn’t — is that we all belong, always. Not to anything so ephemeral as a nation-state, but to everything, to what is. This belonging is involuntary and irrevocable — not achieved through effort or virtue, it can neither be gained nor opted out of. Community is biological fact. Yet we ignore this reality, the innate dignity of our existence. We create groups of belonging, groups that inherently exclude the “other,” as there is no “in” without an “out.”
Given this deep and sticky human habit, what a good trick, a truly sneaky clever move, to aim to create a place where anyone can belong — regardless of religion, caste, race, sex, class, ability, sexual orientation, etc. (Uninterested in originalism, I am pleased to acknowledge that the American circle of belonging has steadily grown over the centuries.)
Welcome, then, to the not-tribe. The jambalaya medley, goulash mishmash mulligan stew, hodgepodge salmagundi brew.
This is my American Dream.
And this is the source of our potential greatness — not materialism or militarism, but inclusion. Syncretic amalgamation. Combining inclusion with freedom of speech and freedom of expression to create a belonging that doesn’t elide the individual or demand conformity, that upholds the primacy of conscience and sensibility — now that’s some kind of brilliant.
This brilliant dream remains largely aspirational; longing is the only part of belonging that many Americans feel. Pushers of various sorts — advertisers, dope dealers, pharmaceutical companies, casinos, and so on — encourage our futile attempts to fill the void. But a dream unrealized, a dream deferred, is not necessarily an impossible dream.
This other American Dream is the dream of the beloved community. In which everyone belongs — to each other, to all of life — and we act as if it were so.
Because it is.
Let’s crown this good in (brother and) sisterhood. From sea to shining sea.
