Rebuilding American

The weather lady said there’s a storm blowing in that’ll roll from coast to coast. An ‘atmospheric river’ they’re calling it, bringing immense amounts of rain and snow to the West Coast and the mountains, and potentially becoming tornadoes in the middle of the country, deep freezes and blizzards in the East, and as always it’s anyone’s guess with Florida.

As a child I thought a storm system like this was a fascinating, wonderful, uniquely American example of our planet’s might. I still do, but now I see news like this and I find myself bracing for yet another example of our changing climates, another test of our infrastructure, and of our ability and willingness to help each other.

Given what else is on the news lately, willingness to help one another hasn’t felt very American for some time now. Whether it’s the donkeys vs. elephants show, another shooting, scandal, court ruling, war, climate catastrophe… everything feels like it’s on the brink in one way or another.

I think this is something we’re all feeling on many levels, particularly at the level of what the hell “American” even means anymore. It seems that we Americans have been either caught in a storm or bracing for one for a long time now. We Americans are lonely and divided, anxious and unhappy, and more fearful than ever of a second civil war, so say the all-knowing polls and surveys.

I don’t know if it’s just that sensational nihilism is that much en vogue right now, or if it’s just lingering pandemic trauma, or both of those things plus something(s) else, but it feels like it’s all wearing on us, and on our collective sense of what “American” is.

America Is Pursuing Happiness In All The Wrong Places and we live in An Age Of Constant Disaster.

Brooks and Thompson, the authors of these pieces, respectively, both write about how to live with the disastrous feeling of something lost, and how to rebuild and move forward with intention from where we’ve been. Brooks speaks on finding renewed happiness and meaning in our American institutions as a driver for cultural/political peace, while Thompson discusses how best to persevere through worldly destruction, and rebuilding together in new ways. I think shining a light through these two pieces at once refracts into something illuminating.

Some Americans feel alienated from, and maybe even angry at the term “American,” and so they seek to distance themselves from it. Others see “American” as a sacred thing in grave danger of extinction, and so they rabidly defend it. Maybe you’re somewhere in between, or a mix of both. Our ideas of what it means to be American, whatever they are, are wrought with tension and existential dilemma.

Brooks writes that the critical moment we’re in with our politics and culture is an opportunity to build something new and great. He offers his “four institutions of meaning,” which are faith, family, friends and work, and argues we must denounce all contempt for our fellow Americans and seek happiness and meaning in these institutions in order to rebuild a more unified and fulfilled sense of “American.” Brooks concludes with: “America is experiencing a falling tide… we need to get our lines in the water now.”

Thompson’s piece addresses the “omnipresence of disaster” in our modern world, and he argues that crises can reveal the best in us. He highlights examples of people coming together in the face of compounding disasters to invent new systems to persevere and rebuild, and he argues that although today disaster is the water we swim in, we must learn to evolve with our changing world. Thompson concludes with: “Disaster may be our present and future, but may the certainty of a vastly changing world keep us also alert to its vast possibility.”

Brooks’ piece addresses grappling with a tenuous, crumbling sense of shared identity, and how to reconstruct it using old foundations. Thompson’s piece is about surviving worldly catastrophe and not only rebuilding again, but rebuilding better in ways we never have. Each author touches on phenomena most Americans are familiar with by now: the loss of something previously taken for granted, the subsequent whiplash of its absence, and the daunting labor of having to set one’s self to rebuilding.

Each of these pieces touches on things that I believe are extremely important in the project of rebuilding what “American” means. If these articles could bang, their lovechild would be an instruction manual on how to survive the disaster of being American, and how to rebuild our meaning and our world, both individually and together, with empathy and sustainability at the helm. Rather than condemning “American” or clinging to a broken version of it, perhaps we should all be finding ways of rebuilding “American.”

I’m simplifying and synthesizing here, but I think taking elements of what each of these authors is talking about makes for a good heading. Brooks is concerned with how we can dig through the aftermath and bring forward that which still serves us. Thompson’s piece emphasizes evolving past the rubble under our feet and riding the wave of crisis toward new shores of innovation. I think that being American requires we do all of this at once, on multiple levels, all the time.

What it means to be American is in crisis. And, I think, to be American means to be in crisis.

What aspects of “American” do we want to dig up and keep? What has been destroyed beyond repair? What was never there in the first place? What entirely new things, meanings, values, systems, can we invent?

In the Spanish language, the word for American is ‘estadounidense,’ because ‘americano‘ can refer to one from the Americas, not just one from the United States. I wish we had such a word in English. A word that emphasizes unity. A word that reminds us that we are indeed a country made up of not just one thing, but of a vast multitude of different things, united as one.

We live in an age of constant disaster, and Americans are looking for meaning in the wrong places. We also live in the era of rebuilding, and for better or worse, rebuilding from destruction is very American (United-States-ian?), and very human.

The United States was in many ways born in fire, and the beating pulse inside what it means to be an American is the booming sound of an eternal, dialectic negotiation of what “American” is. There is no such thing as a static definition of what it means to be American, and there never has been. To be American means to be blessed with the the never-ending curse of deciding for yourself what “American” means.

Rebuilding this part of our world will be a constant test of our imagination, of our infrastructure and of our ability and willingness to help each other. It will mean to always be in crisis, but I don’t believe “American” should be thrown out altogether quite yet. Some of it has been worn away, but much of it can be fixed, and perhaps we can replace what can’t.

There’s a storm blowing in that’ll roll from coast to coast. There’s no singular, correct way forward from here. We’ve built and rebuilt countless times before, and we’ll have to rebuild again in the future. It will require a dynamic combination of scavenging and fixing and splicing and inventing, over and over again. It will be a Sisyphean slog, but it will be fascinating, wonderful, and uniquely American.