Rhonda Reese Purtee

A national identity is a challenging thing to articulate – if every person is more than just one thing, and this is a nation of, for, and by those people, then it, of course, must be more than one thing. But, just as we as individuals are not all things so we as a nation cannot be all things.  We must choose which values, ethics, and beliefs we want to elevate as our core identity. 

I discovered the Jewish American poet, Emma Lazarus in school just like every other American kid.  Her work, “The New Colossus” commissioned for inscription onto the Statue of Liberty so resonated with my young understanding of who we as a nation aspire to be that I memorized it as a child and have held it as a plumb-line against which the various expressions of national identity that ebb & flow through our cultural consciousness can be validated.

This is what I still love about her words; they affirm our nation’s founding doctrine that all people are created equal and life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness are the universal rights of all people.  That this nation seeks to be known throughout the world as the place where hope is nurtured, dreams are fulfilled, and work is rewarded; when one has nowhere else to go, when opportunity cannot be found elsewhere – America’s door is open and the welcoming light of liberty is always shining. 

But, we have not always been who we say we are and when I look back at the times and places where we behaved in ways that were inconsistent with our stated identity, I can recognize the same fear & greed that I am hearing now with such fervency in our current context.  Perhaps it has been my own naiveté, but I continue to be surprised by the lens of fear through which so many of my fellow Americans choose to view their equals (all persons.)  Living in fear is a grievous existence.  As someone who had to work to overcome generalized anxiety, to volunteer to live inside the prison of fear is incomprehensible to me.  And fearing other people is a choice.  Attributing wrong motives to entire swaths of humanity with evidence to the contrary is a choice.  Rejecting the very concept of collective hospitality is a choice.  Greed is often a companion of fear – it is rooted in a scarcity mindset; the notion that there is not enough for everyone and so each must grasp & claw & clutch for resources, and prevent with deadly force any other person from accessing any resources deemed “mine” all while living in a place of exorbitant abundance during a time of unprecedented wealth absolutely defies not just logic, but the very belief set we claim to hold.  It has been proven from time immemorial greed is never satiated.  And so, as a people living in a place of great abundance, the question is not “Do we have enough?” We know that greed will always answer that with a resounding no.  The question is “Do they have a need we can help meet?”

I’m not going to relate to others from a place of greed or fear – I reject with every fiber of my being the perverse belief and practice that says we ever have an excuse for the denigration, alienation, or subjugation of any person on the basis of the amount of melanin in their skin, the longitudinal coordinates of their birthplace, their chromosomal makeup, where or if they went to church on Sunday, or any other construct that attempts to create a hierarchy of value out of the interdependent richness of diversity.

We are not always who we claim to be, but I believe we still aspire to be that place – the people – who say, if your children are hungry, we have food. If you are thirsty, we have clean water. If you are oppressed, freedom can be found in this place. If you are sick, we have medicine. If you are tired, there is beautiful respite here unlike any other place. Save for the 2% who are Indigenous to this place, all the rest of us came to this nation because the light of liberty shone more brightly here than anywhere else. May it ever be so.