America Is Better Than This

In 2016, a boil festering on the butt of America burst. America had been sitting on this boil since its founding. It was sore, throbbing, and inflamed. The infection oozed cleansing the land of indigenous people, enslaving Africans as commodities for forced labor, exploiting children inhumanely as workers, interning citizens of Japanese descent, perpetuating religious intolerance, limiting the rights and status of women, victimizing immigrants, and building a wall to keep out the unwanted. It ruptured during Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency in a torrent of repulsive words, sliming America’s ideals even further with its fetid pus. The broken boil now lies exposed, tender to the touch.

Loathsome language spewing disgusting scorn has erupted countless times in America, but never with such intensity from a major-party presidential candidate over the entire course of his campaign. Trump’s racist, intolerant, sexist, xenophobic insults laid open the persistent boil that infects America’s relentless struggle to create a nation of freedom for all. The promise America holds dearly in its Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights is one of equality, religious freedom, justice, individual rights, diversity, and pursuit of the common good. America is home to these ideals, but the boil festering on its butt has provoked less than stellar behavior in their execution. Trump’s oratory pressed the boil until it burst, laying open to the world an abscess of vileness that has long needed healing.

America is better than this. It is greater than its oozing abscess, and it has a promise to keep. In May of 1969, at Wellesley College, the classmates of Hillary Rodham asked her to speak for them at their commencement. Their school years had been tumultuous times as the war in Vietnam intensified; the Civil Rights Movement made legislative gains; Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated; and a cultural shift was occurring between generations. Rodham said of the American experience: If the experiment in human living doesn’t work in this country, in this age, it’s not going to work anywhere. She spoke of inspiration, caring, people working together to fulfill human needs, and responsibility for self and others. But, she said, for these to happen – for human liberation – there must be integrity, trust, and respect.

Racism, religious intolerance, sexism, and xenophobia do not improve the human condition and have no place in the American experience. They are outside the ideals of its democracy and discredit its promise to the people. All people have the right to share in freedom; to live healthy, thriving lives as integrated citizens without suppression because of race, religion, gender identity, or national origin. Bigotry infects the freedom of all, and America’s open abscess requires the nation’s steadfast concern to be healed.

Soon after a bitter night of hate in Charleston, South Carolina, when nine people were gunned down by a man they had welcomed into their church circle, Hillary Rodham Clinton, bemoaning the incident during a campaign speech, said: I know it’s not usual for somebody running for president to say what we need more of in this country is love and kindness, but that’s exactly what we need more of. Loving kindness gives hope to America’s experiment in human liberation. Its moral values of integrity, trust, and respect go together with the nation’s fundamental, founding principles. If loving kindness were practiced collectively by the utmost extent of its citizenry, America’s basic beliefs might be more fully implemented. Would the practice of loving kindness be the balm to heal the boil’s wound inflicted on so many?

The various races, beliefs, sexualities, and cultures interlaced into the make-up of America should induce tolerance among its peoples out of sheer survival, if nothing else. There is a very real desire among Americans to see their grand experiment in shared freedom work. How these varied peoples treat each other stands as the character of their nation. The boil demeans America. Loving kindness dignifies it. America presents both to the world as it struggles to do the right thing: to courageously honor what is moral and just in living as one people; to give everyone the power to control their own destiny; and to revere what it means to be a person. This is the stuff of decency: what it takes to know and love one’s companions on this land. The Torah says to love one’s neighbor as yourself. Jesus of Nazareth repeated this as a great commandment. Buddha says to consider others as yourself. The Dalai Lama says to be kind. The nation’s founders gave value to loving kindness by entwining its decency into the nation’s principles, and Americans today want to see those principles healed of their infection.

Loving kindness occurs when America is better than its bigotry. In the early morning hours of September 17, 2016, Jourdan Duncan, a young black man, was walking in the industrial area of Benicia, California. Kirk Keefer, a white patrol officer, stopped him. He found it weird that Duncan was alone after midnight in an area unfriendly to pedestrians. Questioning him, Keefer learned that Duncan was walking from work to his home seven miles away in Vallejo. His old Volvo had stopped running several weeks ago, so Duncan walked for two hours each way to keep his job. Keefer, concerned for Duncan’s well-being in this tough area, offered him a ride home, which took all of fifteen minutes. Soon after, out of loving kindness, the Benicia Police Officers’ Association bought a bicycle for young Duncan, which cut his commute in half.

Loving kindness, as shown by Keefer and his colleagues, comes from the heart of goodness, bringing compassion with it. It honors others as worthy, places faith in their character, and expresses sincerity in wanting to do the right thing. Loving kindness leads to a homeless man in Boston being sure that the backpack he found, which contained over $40,000, was returned to the very grateful owner who had lost it. Loving kindness buys school clothes for homeless children, pays for meals when strangers are hungry, and repairs homes for indigent neighbors. Loving kindness is common cause for the common good. It risked its own welfare in flagrantly aiding slaves in their desperate fleeing to freedom prior to emancipation. It sat at segregated lunch counters while being spat upon and punched. It motivates cities and churches to show humane consideration to potential deportees. For over one hundred sixty years, it has pushed for women’s rights in the home, at work, in personal lives, and in the voting booth as the right thing to do. It lives in Modesto, California, where coming together as a community helped the school district introduce a world religion course to ease strife from demographic changes in ways of worshiping: When you don’t know about something, you fear it – and when you fear something, you become more likely to strike out against it. We wanted students to understand that even if we disagree with a group of people, they still have the right to be here (Modesto teacher Yvonne Taylor).

America fears and loves at the same time, but repeatedly overcomes fear to reach out in decency for the sake of others. Fostering loving kindness to soothe the boil’s wound brings fear to many who see hate as their only answer to what stands in the way to their well-being. They have vile contempt for anyone who is not their kind. Any loving kindness towards these others is anathema to them. Their hatred flares in the face of any loving kindness that attempts to change the old mores built up by fear, such as blacks not staying in their place, people of all faiths participating fully in American life, women taking control of their own lives and bodies, or undocumented immigrants finding solace in America as home.

Thankfully, most Americans turn to love instead of hate. In Los Angeles, Elvis Summers built a tiny sleeping shelter for Irene McGhee after befriending the sixty-year-old grandma who slept on the dirt near his apartment. Summers, a white man, did not fear McGhee’s blackness; he did not fear her homelessness; he saw her need and provided what shelter he could. One of America’s great virtues is in answering the call to do the right thing. The fear that promotes racism, religious intolerance, sexism, and xenophobia can be assuaged when the heart finds loving kindness. Fear brings despair and desperation. Loving kindness garners hope. The hope Summers brought to McGhee, and to himself, came from loving kindness.

America is a diverse populace with one overall intent: liberation, the hope of humanity to set itself free from the bondage of oppression. Liberation does not come from the depravity of hatred that creates fear and loathing. It comes when citizens knock down the wall of their differences to find common ground; a place to build inclusive, egalitarian communities for the betterment of all. This, as Clinton says, is love trumping fear; the willingness to see one’s neighbor as one’s self, which is to know and love what is right and good in each other. The American ideal is to care for one another: to trust, to respect, to find comfort in community and the common cause of freedom. The great American way welcomes, absorbs, and restores.

America can either apply the balm of loving kindness to heal its open wound of disdain, or it can sit on the pain of its bigotry. It makes the choice daily within the struggle to keep free of oppression. The fetid pus of torment stains liberty. Loving kindness honors liberty with integrity, trust, and respect as embedded deeply in the ideals of the American promise. Whenever loving kindness overcomes fear, the nation sees a better day.