Where do we go when we realize we aren’t who we want to be? This question stayed with me after listening to this week’s show, featuring journalist Anand Giridharadas. His work examines America’s relationship to wealth and the moral compromises that come from our obsession with it. Especially when it comes to ideas of equality, Giridharadas says, “there’s a chasm between the core of the American self-image and the reality of who we are.”
Giridharadas is not the first to point out the dissonance between America’s potential and its reality. Again and again, we’ve called each other to be accountable to our hope, asking ourselves, as Vincent Harding does: Is America possible? It’s a sentiment expressed...
by Langston Hughes: “O, let America be America again— / The land that never has been yet— / And yet must be—the land where every man is free.”
by Vincent Harding: “What is it that makes for dreams, for visions, for some audacious movement beyond the ‘is’ to the ‘ought’ even in the midst of the most desperate and dangerous situations?”
by Valarie Kaur: “What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?”
What a beautiful question to echo through our history. It’s one that nurses hope and possibility. As Giridharadas says, “We are not who we think we are. That is always a hard thing to hear, but it’s also a creative thing to hear because what I’m not saying is, ‘You've got to live up to my values.’ What I’m suggesting is, ‘We’ve got to live up to our values.’”
What possibilities do you hope our present enables? You can write to me at newsletter@onbeing.org.
Yours,
Kristin Lin
Editor, On Being Studios
P.S. — A few weeks ago, we asked you to recommend a poem that brings you a sense of connection. We received a wealth of responses and will be sharing some of them in the coming weeks — a community poetry well, of sorts. Here’s the first.
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