Dear America:
I was born your scruffy Chicago boy running the alleys and vacant lots of the South Side. My neighborhood: Black, brown, white and Asian; gentiles, Jews and Muslims. Lower middle class. 1960s.
I was your patriotic public school kid pledging allegiance, hand over heart, then obediently walking single file to the air raid shelter in the basement of Bret Harte Elementary. But I wasn’t scared. I knew you’d keep me safe.
We grieved together when John F. Kennedy Jr. saluted his father’s flag-draped casket and, oh too shortly after, in Los Angeles and Memphis, when two more of our heroes, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., were gunned down. Even then I thought, we have to be better than this.
Watch me eating grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner while watching the dogs, the hoses and the hatred in Alabama on a black-and-white television. I knew in my young heart that as crazy as things were, the center would hold.
I still believed in you, perhaps foolishly, even as the images of dead GIs and a naked girl burned by napalm filled the pages of magazines.
I opposed the war by walking out of Mather High School after the massacre at Kent State University and singing along with Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and so many others.
Where have all the flowers gone?
Which side are you on, boys?
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Eventually, but too late for Vietnam, I learned to love the soldiers and hate the wars — all of them.
At 18, I struggled to stay on your side — God’s side, you proudly boasted — by now a long-haired, college hippie living in the Colorado mountains with books, guitar and a journal full of angst-filled babble. I learned the beauty of our landscape was breathtaking and fragile and that I needed that expanse to hear my own voice.
I wanted to be an American writer, your chronicler, the next Nelson Algren, Jack Kerouac or James Baldwin. You said, “why not?” In America, with hard work and a few lucky breaks, anything is possible. But, you cautioned, you have to tell the truth, even when those truths hurt.
I studied history, government and current affairs, and discovered that our nation is pretty good, but not as exceptional as I thought, and that all nations feel exceptional, too.
By 20-something, I also realized I was not as exceptional as I thought, and that most people felt the same way.
I did become a writer, albeit a minor one. By then I could relate my own struggles and failures to our nation’s same challenges. I also knew that our struggles are what make us American. We do not shy away from our own ugly truths.
At 66, I have now lived through a quarter of your 240-plus years. I have witnessed the unthinkable: the senseless mass shootings of our citizens and the subsequent mass shrugs from lawmakers; jetliners crashing into the twin towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, and our sense of peace forever shattered; and, currently, domestic and international terrorism captured in high definition and in real time. And now climate change and a deadly pandemic.
Together we’ve made horrible mistakes for which there are no excuses. We have had preening political leaders who do not have our best interests at heart and who line their pockets with blood money from lobbyists.
At our own peril, we have ignored history’s lessons, and so we fight the same battles generation after generation. Racism. Violence. Sexism. Sheer stupidity.
We are flawed. We are human.
We still have so much work to do. I don’t believe it’s us versus them. To survive, there can only be us. We are joined forever at the hip, for better or worse.
In the months leading up to the next election, we will again hear from the loudest, angriest Americans. Some of the reasons for their anger are real: loss of jobs to automation, a fear of an increasingly diverse country and a decreasing faith in the fair play of our political and economic systems.
I am sympathetic, but I am also grateful. You have given this city kid the opportunity to dream big. To fail and to come back. More than once.
Most importantly, you have blessed me with the greatest gift of all, one that is so uniquely American.
Hope.
The hope that we can be better. That the future is bright with possibilities. That even I, as equally as flawed as you, might at last do something that is worthy of the potential that America promises. Even in these most troubled times.
Stephen J. Lyons is the author of five books of essays and journalism. His most recent book is “West of East.”
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