medium | What does it
mean to be American? To really “be” — see, feel, think, act American,
so much so that you are not self-aware of it, because it is unconscious,
reflexive, invisible, this way of “being”?
Well,
it means what it always has. Punching down, not lifting up. Punching
down is hardwired into America by now, thanks to a unique history of
settlers — who had never had any — punching the next wave down for
relative hierarchical position. An attitude of cruelty was born. And so
today cruelty is the point of its institutions, the purpose of its
norms, and the linchpin of its perverse idea of virtue, that by
punishing people, we can better them. It is all that Americans expect
from each other — and give to each other. That is the terrible burden of
a Promised Land that history’s despised warred among one another for
domination of.
The
problem is this. A society of people punching one another down must
collapse. What else could it do? It cannot rise, can it? If I am
punching you down, and I am punching the next person down below me, how
can anyone ever lift anyone up? But without lifting one another up, a
society cannot grow in quantity or quality of life. This, too, is what
happened to Soviet Russia.
America
has never reckoned with its history of cruelty. Instead, it developed a
defensive mythology of being welcoming — even while every new wave of
immigrants had to fight, sometimes quite literally little street by
street, against the last wave, for a piece of the Promise Land. Like all
myths, that one — was a lie that revealed the truth: America was a
Promised Land for the huddled masses to roam free — but only if they
could fend off the other tribes, by punching them down, endlessly,.
A
Promised Land is like a Garden of Eden. But who can live in the Garden
peacefully but angels? Human beings, flawed, indelicate things, are only
meant to be cast out— they are ever in conflict, in tension, hungry and
ravenous. And that is never truer than for their most despised — who
need to be healed most, or else will ravage their Gardens worst.
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