The Courage to be an American

              

We the people find ourselves in a period of tangible fear – a collective state of mind that seems disorienting to us.  It is not wholly unfamiliar - we’ve been through this before and so have our ancestors.  We as a nation have been attacked and shaken and knocked down in the past by actions that defy our understanding, but it is always our response that defines us.  When we are at our best, we triumph by drawing from the values and essence of what it means to be an American, and once in a while, we need a refresher.

Despite our prosperity, there is one truism that we can trace back to our national origins and affirm as common ground with our founding fathers: 

It is not easy to be an American. 

America doesn’t guarantee success, but it does guarantee a chance to succeed – that, at least, is the principle we strive to uphold.  The freedom to take that chance is the driving force behind our values and prosperity.  It’s a simple promise that we offer to the world, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.  It never has been.  As a result, we have within our collective DNA an element of fearlessness – a strength common to both those who boarded a ship and those who survived being shackled to it.  We have within us the ability to confront terror with strength and oppression with a passionate demand for freedom.

This is why our greatest threat is not some other country, caliphate or entity coming to our shores and physically taking away our freedom.  The real threat is ourselves, and whether or not we succumb to it will be determined by a simple question:  can our empathy as a nation overcome our fear?

Consider the attributes of fear and empathy – two poles in a spectrum that are inversely related.  In each of us there is some fear-to-empathy ratio that determines how we react, whether it’s to world events like a terrorist attack, or to each other, as a police officer might at a traffic stop.  Where there is great fear, there is no empathy; our survival mode takes over and our judgment is often the first casualty.  Our inability to embrace the diversity and commonality of humanity – to see the world through the eyes of people of races or religions different from our own - is a weakness that is always rooted in fear.

Conversely, where there is great empathy, there is no fear.  In the extreme, empathy is the force that drove people toward the victims rather than away from the bombs at the end of the Boston Marathon; it is the doctor who goes off to fight Ebola when the fearful want to shut down all inbound flights from an entire continent.  It is the Dallas police officers who protected protestors in the face of gunfire directed at them.  And it is Captain Humayun Khan, whose split-second decision saved many lives in exchange for his own.  These are extraordinary examples that call upon us to at least aspire to empathize under far less threatening circumstances.  At its core, empathy is an affirmation of the universal nature of humanity – a consideration that underscores our obligation to take care of each other.  Empathy allows us to transcend fear and ultimately eliminate it.

But empathy is not as easy as fear.  It does take courage, but it is also a distinctive quality of being an American.  The courage to be American means acceptance of our principles of freedom and the belief in inalienable rights for all of humanity – a constitutional assertion that is courageously empathetic.

All of us fall somewhere on the fear-empathy spectrum, and where we fall determines our individual perspective on almost every major issue of our time:  terrorism, racism, sexism, gun control, immigration, health care, poverty, criminal justice, LGBT rights and even income inequality.

An example:  Imagine a boat of 100 refugees fleeing persecution and desperate to reach American shores.  While the empathetically-driven are motivated to help all of them out of a sense of humanitarian obligation, the fear-driven are inclined to turn them all away because even one of them might be a terrorist. And because judgment is a casualty of fear, justification of that fear can often take the form of presuming they are all terrorists.

Dehumanization is a common strategy of the fearful – to proclaim that those who scare us are criminals, rapists, terrorists or some other threat to our being.  These acts of discrimination and generalization are not based in fact, but because fear impairs judgment, there need not be any factual basis for these beliefs to be embellished and sustained.  The question then becomes: do we have it within us to overcome this fear?  Do we have the courage to be American?

As a nation, when America has fallen short of its ideals, it is because we have succumbed to the reflex of fear at the expense of empathy.  We were afraid of Japanese Americans during World War II, so we imprisoned many thousands of innocent people.  We were afraid of communists in the 1950’s and so we persecuted hundreds indiscriminately.  We had laws that segregated blacks and whites for fear of “mixing”.  Today we are afraid of Muslims, and because of that, there are calls to discriminate against the entire religion.  There is plenty of historical precedent:  when fear triumphs, empathy is purged and innocent people suffer.

But when the lapses in courage come to an end:  as when Joseph Welch asked Joseph McCarthy “Have you no sense of decency?”, we can begin to put our fears to rest. 

America is at its best when empathy trumps fear and the doors are open to the huddled masses of the world – when an immigrant is not an “alien”, but simply a fellow human on the well-worn path to becoming one of us.  That is the essence of America.

 

We are the home of the brave – a bravery that we rightly attribute to those who we send abroad to protect our freedom.  But today we don’t have that luxury because freedom requires courage both at home and abroad.  As a result, we are now faced with another once-in-a-generation opportunity to define what it means to be Americans.  Our forefathers showed the required courage and so did our ancestors. 

Now it’s our turn.