Cruelty Doesn't Make America Great
Greatness is in kindness, in love, in care
Cruelty has been American for a looooong time.
At the founding of this country — what you might call ground zero of America — only a select few White men were considered fully human, designated as citizens.
All of the other humans here were, by default, less-than-human.
Women had no right to freedom, to autonomy.
Whole human beings were considered no more than property.
Hold up.
We need to go back even further.
The crew of people who founded this country were following in the footsteps of others who essentially walked into someone else’s home… insulted them… attacked them and all of their loved ones… and then told them the home was no longer theirs.
Cruelty is in the DNA of this country.
Cruelty is the energetic soup from which every part of America grew.
And here’s the problem, my fellow Americans: we never collectively made any kind of conscious choice to disavow and transform that cruelty… so it has persisted and metastasized.
Cruelty has become so normalized in America that many Americans don’t even register it anymore — it just seems like the background painting for our lives, the way things are, as American as apple pie.
And now, the person who we have elected as our national president — our figurehead leading the country — has taken this particularly American knee-jerk impulse to soaring heights, embodying cruelty in ever-new and ever-more-ostentatious permutations and scenarios.
The cruelty of this federal administration is breath-taking.
Breath-taking…
…as in, it’s hard to continue breathing and being human, while seeing another human being behaving in that way… and treating other human beings that way.
And it should be.
We should find it hard to breathe, to keep being human and living our lives, when we see another human being behaving in that way.
We should never, ever normalize this.
And here’s the thing.
We usually interpret not-normalizing-this as something external to ourselves. We may think of marches. Or boycotts. Or sternly-worded emails or social media posts.
All of that is fine. All of that can make a difference.
Yet.
Do you know what is most powerful?
Crowding out the cruelty and overcoming it, painting directly on the canvas of our shared lives, by embodying and bringing to life the antidote: kindness.
So.
What will you do?
How are we going to actively grow the antidote to all of this cruelty?
How are we going to write a new story for America?
What words of this story will you write with your actions?
What energy will you embody?
What reality will you bring to life… with the way you live?
Whether cruelty continues to be as American as apple pie is up to all of us. We decide. We write this story, together. All of us.
How will you contribute?
How will you make America great?
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Thank you Cecilia for breathing not only hope into this world but the inspiration and need to nurture kindness in our selves and others. I have been feeling moved to the power of kindness in this gob smacked, deplorable time. Its hard to love and be kind sometimes, but I know its necessary. You words have helped to fortify that.