Join us Saturday, March 8 at 10am for Tillamook County’s version of “Civic Saturdays” with Jim Heffernan hosting. The sermons explore new and better ways to be a citizen.  The are aimed at developing “citizenship muscle.  Each sermon functions as a stand-alone sermon.  Don’t worry about missing earlier sessions.   Zoom link below

Invite link for Saturday 10AM

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88905106346?pwd=TEaw5qfSN2X5UoxBHgZSF7UsqwMugD.1

Recordings are available for those who are unable to attend the zoom.  Contact me at codger817@gmail.com and I’ll e-mail one to you.  Recordings also available for earlier sessions.

This week’s sermon is 34 minutes long and will examine the legitimacy of our democracy and our union.  It leads to the resolution, “I hereby resolve to imagine my country and to do everything in my power to create it.”  We can talk about the sermon afterwards, or not.

Recordings for past sermons are available contact me at codger817@gmail.com

 

A GREAT AWAKENING 

Town Hall • Seattle, WA April 8, 2017

Rebecca Solnit- From A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

Published 2009

You can read recent history as a history of privatization not just of the economy but also of society, as marketing and media shove imagina­ tion more and more toward private life and private satisfaction, as cit­ izens are redefined as consumers, as public participation falters and with it any sense of collective or individual political power, as even the language for public emotions and satisfactions withers. There

is no money in what is aptly called free association: we are instead encouraged by media and advertising to fear each other and regard public life as a danger and a nuisance, to live in secured spaces, communicate by electronic means, and acquire our information from media rather than each other. But in disaster people come together, and though some fear this gathering as a mob, many cherish it as an experience of a civil society that is close enough to paradise.

CAROL TAVRIS AND ELLIOT ARONSON – From Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) Published 2007

Depression is not “anger turned inward”; if anything, anger is depres­ sion turned outward. Follow the trail of anger inward, and there you will find the small, still voice of pain….

In the horrifying calculus of self-deception, the greater the pain we inflict on others, the greater the need to justify it to maintain our feel­ings of decency and self-worth….

Rebels and dissidents challenge the complacent belief in a just world, and, as the theory would predict, they are usually denigrated for their efforts. While they are alive, they may be called “cantanker­ ous,” “crazy,” “hysterical,” “uppity,” or “duped.” Dead, some of them become saints and heroes, the sterling characters of history. It’s a matter of proportion. One angry rebel is crazy, three is a conspiracy, fifty is a movement.

Welcome. It’s great and very fitting that we are gathering today in a space that was once a Christian Science church and is now a civic temple at the heart of our city’s life.

I’ve just spent a week with Jena in the other Washington and in New York, speaking to all kinds of audiences and organizations about my new book, You’re More Powerful Than You Think, which is a citizen’s guide to exercising power.

The trip was fantastic, and I’ll tell you today about some of the things I learned. But I was running hard every hour of every day and I didn’t sleep much. So now my body clock is a bit off. I’ve been hovering in that space where wakefulness and sleep are commingled, where the line be­ tween a dream and a memory becomes blurred.

From that interstitial state of mind emerges the question I’d like to ponder today: What’s the difference between a promise you’ve never kept and a lie? At what point does a failure to deliver become not just an omission or a condition of regrettable tardiness but an act, an act of malicious deceit?

That, my friends, is the American question.

The American promise, is what Thomas Jefferson wrote and others extended, clause by clause. It is our creedal pledge of equality under law, of liberty and justice for all, of government by, of, and for the people. It’s a creed we haven’t yet lived up to.

More than that, it is a dream. It is a dream in the sense of an aspiration, for economic security and material comfort. It is a dream too in the sense of Martin Luther King’s vision of racial integration and equal opportunity for all.

A dream exists both above and below “real” life-above, in that experiences of time and space are intensified and heightened by our unleashed imaginations; below, in that every dream trawls through the murky waters of animal instinct and sense memory.

The American Dream is just like that. It’s a great feat of imagination­ and a stirring of our basest nature. We’re not sure if it’s real, yet we can’t seem to shake it. Today I want to talk about three states of being in the American body politic and spirit politic: the states of sleeping, dream­ ing, and awakening.

SLEEPING

On our last night in New York, Jena and I went to Studio 54 in Manhat­tan. It’s no longer the disco of hedonistic ’70s lore-which is too bad, because you should see us on the dance floor (especially her)-but it’s now a gorgeous, intimate Broadway theater. There we saw a celebrated and new play by Lynn Nottage called Sweat.

Sweat is set in Reading, Pennsylvania, between 2000 and 2008. It chronicles a group of friends who’ve worked all their lives at the town’s steel tubing plant, as they reckon with the slow-motion decimation of their factory and their community. Things get complicated when one of the friends, who’s black, gets promoted off the line and into man­agement. Things get even more complicated when upper management starts squeezing the workers and locking them out until they agree to a 60 percent pay cut. Jobs and machines go to Mexico. A Colombian American bartender crosses the picket line.

Disaster ensues-not the acts of God that generate surges of fellow feeling and collective action, as Rebecca Solnit described in our first reading; but rather the acts of capitalists that yield only tragic isolation.

Nottage, who wrote Sweat before the election, has said her subject was the human cost of “America’s de-industrial revolution.” Donald Trump, more bluntly, has called it “American carnage,” and he vacuumed up votes from the real Reading in November.

But Lynn Nottage is no Donald Trump. She is an African American woman, she is a genius not of the self-proclaimed kind but of the MacArthur Fellowship kind, and she listens to other humans. She spent two years living in Reading, listening to the women and men, black and white and Hispanic, of every generation, who grew up believing in the certainty of their work and their sweat and their pride and their dignity-even as evidence mounted all around them that all would be out­ sourced and shipped away.

Out of that listening came this play. From the first moments, it gave me the kind of lump in the throat that precedes a deep and long-deferred cry. At various moments, often unexpected ones, I did cry. And in the final scene, many tears were flowing.

I’m not going to give away the plot points that pressed those tears out. But the particulars aren’t important. What made me cry was the grinding, inexorable tragedy of these characters who had believed in a promise that became a lie.

At each scene break, images from national news are projected onto the sets, without commentary or explicit connection to the plot-images of President Clinton and President George W. Bush, images of the stock market booming and then collapsing, Wall Street bailouts being announced. Barack Obama is never mentioned, and what made me cry was the unsaid truth that we learned between 2009 and today: that it wouldn’t matter. “Hope and Change” didn’t happen in the Rust Belt. W’s promise was “compassionate conservatism.” Bill Clinton’s slogan in ’92 was “Putting People First.”

The truth was that no matter who was president, these people were getting screwed. Global capital was gutting local labor. There was no compassion to it. What made me cry that night was feeling the sheer distance-the awful silent chasm-between the elites who’ve rigged the game during my lifetime and the people who’ve paid the price.

And what haunted me was how long I’d been asleep while this was happening in America-the complicity in my slumber.

Let me back up a step. Two weeks ago, we at Citizen University held our annual national conference. The theme was”Reckoning and Re­ pair” in a polarized and severely unequal America, and we had speakers and teachers from many domains there to share ideas and lessons from history and politics.

But I was struck by how much the learning and teaching at the conference was either above or below politics. Above, in that it was on a spiritual plane, about values and moral aspiration; below, in that it was about the forgotten fundamentals of respect and human presence-how to see each other and feel each other and recognize each other, deeply-fundamentals that we’ve neglected in American civic life. Speaker after speaker returned to this theme of re-presenting ourselves face-to-face.

I recently learned about a theater company called 600 Highwaymen that stages beautifully immersive performances in which lines between audience and performer are smudged by invitations to touch, to sense, to feel the faces and see the eyes and bear the weight and the spirit of the people all around you. That’s what we all need now.

So when I was watching Sweat, I was highly attuned to those moments onstage-heartbreaking, endowed moments-when characters would hold or touch or see one another. To provide small mercies and fleeting comforts that would still not be enough to compensate for the stripping away of dignity, of place and purpose. There’s a refrain throughout the play, many variations of “They don’t even see you.”

And later, “I’m gonna make ’em see me.”

This is why people have been flocking to see Sweat the same way they’re flocking to read J. D. Vance’s Appalachian memoir Hillbilly Elegy:to figure out how it happened. To empathize with the folks whose suffering and bottled-up rage and shame begat Trump.

Empathizing with the pain of another is good, of course. But empathy can be dangerous if it masks the underlying imbalances of power that create the pain in the first place. The prime task in the United States today is not for the privileged to witness the suffering of others. The prime task is to ask how this suffering came to be-to understand how power was monopolized by a few to betray and diminish so many peo­ ple into invisibility. And then for all of us, together, to change the story. Even if it costs us something.

The whole time I was watching Sweat, because I am a teacher of civic power, I was asking myself what else these Reading steelworkers could have done. How else could they have organized against the financiers and the company owners? Could they have mobilized allies from other states, to expand the arena? Could they have pressed the media to pub­licize NAFTA’s effects earlier? Why didn’t they band together in the face of economic disaster to revive civic clubs and associations and generate power? Could they have put out a call for people who seemingly had nothing to do with their sector and their lives, to come to Reading and stand with them? People, for instance, like me?

Then I had to ask: What else could I have done while the American Dream was evaporating for so many Americans? Why did it take me so long to wake up and see my fellow citizens?

DREAMING

Maybe it’s because I was dreaming too hard.

Often people look at my life and early career-son of Chinese immigrants, product of public schools in tiny Wappingers Falls, New York, goes off to Yale and becomes a White House speechwriter-as an embodiment of the American Dream. I tell the story that way myself sometimes.

But today I think that when I was a young man, lost in my dreams, I was rather blind.

Let me tell you about the first set of speeches I wrote for President Clinton. It was 1993, and we were planning a trip to Moscow. This was going to be the first time an American president had visited Russia since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the implosion of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War.

A few weeks before the trip, a fellow speechwriter and I sat down in the Oval Office with the president, to take notes as he riffed on the kinds of themes and topics he would want to address on this historic trip. I figured he would go to policy issues. I was wrong. He spent the whole time musing aloud about psychology and national character.

Russia, he said, was a great nation. More, it was a great civilization.

And though we in the U.S. might celebrate the end of communism and the beginning of democracy there, and though we might frame this as a narrative of progress, we had to be careful. We had to be careful, he said, to attend to the wounded pride of the Russian people, who, after all,were now in a shaky economic situation and at the mercy of their former enemies. Though the average Russian might be relieved to be rid of a militaristic totalitarian government, much of that relief was canceled out by the anxiety and even shame of having lost superpower status.

So the key, the president told us, was to help the Russian people channel their yearning for greatness and pride in a healthy and constructive direction. To tell them that meeting the challenges of creating a free market liberal democracy would be a new chance to prove in a new way the enduring greatness and resilience of this nation.

I thought this was so astute at the time. It was certainly vintage Clinton, applying X-ray insight into the human psyche, and at the in­ ternational scale rather than only the interpersonal. I followed the president’s direction closely, layering his speeches with soulful references to the poetry and literature and music and spirit of Mother Russia. He made people feel good on that trip. He felt their pain.

Of course, we know how things turned out. Clinton’s counterpart, Boris Yeltsin, had been courageous in the days of liberation but turned out to be an undisciplined leader whose cronies strip-mined the state for personal enrichment and fueled corruption, chaos, and kleptocracy everywhere. Out of that disorder, and out of the nostalgia for Soviet­ era certainty, emerged the canny KGB operative who rules Russia today-who took personal control of the kleptocracy-and who later would help elect an American president who exploited American fears of lost greatness.

As that president might say: Sad.

But it truly is sad, because while President Clinton seemed psycho­ logically astute and the rhetoric I wrote for him sounded the right notes, we-and I mean now the United States-did not in fact show the Russian people respect. Puffing them up about their greatness and then ignoring them was not the same as actual respect. Telling them that they could now have a junior version of the American Dream of free markets and free elections was not the same as respect. (Especially when it didn’t happen.) A century after the Russian Revolution, that sickly nation is great mainly in its capacity to do harm.

And what’s doubly sad is that we-President Clinton and his team­ did not apply the same sensitivity to lost greatness and wounded pride to the swaths of our own country that were being de-industrialized by his Wall Street-friendly policies.

So: What could I have done? I had no hand in NAFTA or the Glass­ Steagall repeal or the deregulation of commodities markets-policies that forcefully tilted our economy away from labor and toward capital. It wasn’t my job. It was above my pay grade. And anyway, the economy was booming by the late ’90s, the dot-com bubble was rising. While I didn’t quite buy the notion that textile and steel workers who’d lost their jobs to Vietnam and Mexico could suddenly thrive selling stuff on eBay, it seemed at the time that things would work out for everyone.

But I was dreaming. Even after I left the White House, I didn’t question the orthodoxies of unchecked free trade. I didn’t defend the orthodoxies either. I just didn’t pay attention. When the costs of free trade became clearer, I didn’t think of it as my problem.

It was. When I think about what’s happened in this country economically over my lifetime I think I was part of the problem, mainly because I was not a part of the solution. I could have been, had I been as awake as I am today. I should have been. It was my job, whatever my professional title. Because I was a citizen of the United States who had the social capital and the connections to speak and to be heard.

You can call me a product of the American Dream but in fact I am a product of the American meritocracy, which is not the same thing and in fact is often its enemy. The meritocracy of test-taking and selective colleges that made talented outsiders like Bill Clinton from Hope, Ar­ kansas, a Rhodes Scholar and a U.S. president, is about “merit” only in a narrow SAT sense and even then only at the front end, just to get in the door.

A friend of mine named Rocky told me once about his dad, who grew up in Appalachia but got out, got educated, and became a college professor-but never lost the aggrieved and mistrustful mindset of his Appalachian roots. As Rocky, the son of a professor, inherited the advantages that propelled him to a very selective Eastern college which then opened doors for a successful career, his dad always gave off an unspoken vibe that, as Rocky puts it, “connections are cheating.”

If getting into the American meritocracy is mainly about a numerical score on a test, the preparation for which is itself influenced by inherited advantages, staying in is much more about who you know. This is the dirty little secret of the so-called meritocracy. And once you’re in, you are of course motivated to believe that you get access to awesome opportunities because you deserve it.

The corollary to that, of course, is that anyone who doesn’t have access to awesome opportunities doesn’t deserve it. “Mistakes were made, but not by me.”

This self-justifying myth of a deserving elite and an undeserving everyone else has fed inequality in the United States and helped people at the top rationalize why they should ignore it. It isn’t necessarily sur­prising that the powerful have a strong instinct for self-justification.

They need to defend their privilege, which is bound up with their identity, and they do so in ways both conscious and unconscious.

What is surprising is how often the powerless join them in defending it.

Psychologists call it “system justification theory,” and it posits that people without power tend to blame themselves for their weak situation; worse, they often actively defend the system that renders them powerless. Why? Because it sometimes can be more bearable to make excuses for the system and its inequities than to admit the possibility that you are truly without agency. The latter is a greater threat to your dignity.

Underlying all these dynamics is the presence of cognitive dissonance-the tension between the image we want to have of ourselves and our actual circumstances. Humans always resolve cognitive dissonance in ways that reduce pain. That means explaining away-rationalizing-the embarrassment of being at the bottom. It means buying into legitimizing myths, the cultural narratives and ideologies that explain why the haves have and the have-nots have not.

In the words of one study, by Robb Willer of Stanford University and several other scholars, “The more participants reported feeling powerless, the more they believed that economic inequality was fair and legitimate.”

Until now. What has made a moment like ours so tumultuous and exciting and dangerous is that meritocratic trickle-down legitimizing myths have lost their grip. People without power-or who feel in relative terms that they’ve lost power-have decided to reject elite rationalizations of the status quo. Trump supporters and Sanders supporters may not have shared a political style or a moral palette, but they did share in spades this readiness to “burn it all down.”

People will tell themselves a self-blaming story as long as they possibly can if it helps keep cognitive dissonance at bay. And in America that is a very long time, because our hyper individualistic culture blinds us to forces beyond the control of, well, an individual. But when enough evidence accumulates that the game is truly crony rigged, and that merit and effort have little to do with ascent, that justice is not blind but instead winks at the powerful, there comes a forceful snapback to reality. Literally, a dis-illusionment.

The pain of such disillusionment can be converted to action and re­ form-as during the American Revolution or the Civil Rights Movement or it can lead to an utterly paralyzing cynicism. We are in a world of such pain today. The key variable now is whether citizens will wake up and remember how to claim power.

AWAKENING

What does it mean to be awakened?

Some activists I know have come to resent the way white Establish­ ment liberals are bending over backwards these days to empathize with white Trump voters. When whites face a drug epidemic, they note, there are calls for compassion and treatment instead of mass incarcera­ tion and military-grade policing. When angry white voters elect a man who gives courage and cover to bigotry and hate, we are asked to under­ stand the pain and fear that motivated them instead of the pain and fear they are now generating among nonwhite others.

It’s a valid point. In fact, it’s hard to deny. Yet I cannot shut down the impulse to understand. And I do not think that awakening or empathy need to be zero-sum. Because when I see a piece of art like Sweat-or when I read a similar work like my friend Robert Schenkkan’s The Kentucky Cycle, a Pulitzer-winning set of nine short plays that take place between the 1770s and the 1970s on the same piece of ground in coal country-what I see is not white people getting too much coddling for having too many feelings of unrequited entitlement.

What I see is an opportunity to deliver on an unmet promise. What I see is a bright thick thread of a movement for renewal and reform. The desire to be seen, to be recognized, to not be overlooked or discarded or treated as a tool or an inert object or an obstacle-this desire is what connects Reading to Ferguson, rural opioid addicts to young urban gangsters, fast-food workers to coal miners, migrant farmworkers to Muslim refugees.

This desire is the stuff of an awakening. It is the stuff of a broad and diverse coalition of people united by their yearning to be somebody, to live the American promise of opportunity and reward for striving. Who can activate this desire in a way that elevates rather than scapegoats?

Who can connect these isolated stories of disenfranchisement into an epic of empowerment?

We can.

Throughout American history, and especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this land was set afire by religious revivalism.

These Great Awakenings, as they were called, initially fire-and­ brimstone and later more ecstatically evangelical, always tracked deep shifts in our society: the violent theft of Native lands; the consolidation of slavery; the urbanization and then the industrialization of the economy; the rise of speculative finance and the financial panics,-mini-Depressions-that broke out every few decades.

All these tectonic shifts generated volcanic bursts of collective spiritual searching among white citizens. And all that religious seeking yielded massive social reforms every generation or two, from abolition to Prohibition to women’s suffrage to the Progressive Era’s curbing of monopolistic capitalism to the Civil Rights Movement.

In the twenty-first century we are a less churched nation. But all of us gathered here this morning are evidence that the human impulse for rebirth and renewal and great awakening is timeless, and it is secular as well as religious. Or, to use the language of Civic Saturdays, it is civic religious.

When I speak of American civic religion I mean not only the kinds of civic scripture read at the start of Civic Saturdays. What animates the text is the spirit. And what the spirits of Jefferson and Lincoln and King tell me today is that it’s time to wake up. We are either going to die a slow national death, lost in the loops of our segregated self-justifying dreams, or we are going to set in motion a rejuvenation together.

Simply by showing up today you are saying you choose rebirth. You are part of a vanguard that will do the work of stitching movements and communities together into a bigger story. The greatness of America arises not when the people scrape for scraps beneath the indifferent gaze of a moneyed and merit-badged elite. The greatness of America arises when the people unite to push back to share in power and opportunity.

How do we convert this awakening into something coherent? Let me tell you what I’ve learned in the first week of travels on my book tour.

First, we’ve got to make a bigger story of us. Among my progressive friends, “intersectionality” is the buzzword these days: connecting self-identified causes like feminism and racial justice. But deep intersectionality expands that in-group to include white and black workers in the South who voted Trump but are literally getting chewed in the auto parts factories that moved from Mexico back to Mississippi and Alabama when corporations realized they could exploit Southern labor like Mexican labor.

I call this “Confederate capitalism,” and there was a cover story in a recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek that exposed its ravages: the pressure from foreign auto and auto parts companies, in complicity with union-busting state governments, to force low-wage workers to work extra shifts with no safety protections or recourse or remedy.

When I read that, I thought that’s just wrong. This is America. Then I thought: they should be allies with the people of Standing Rock and $15 Now and Black Lives Matter and others who are getting screwed by systems of concentrated power.

There’s a big affirmative story of us that they-we-can all fit into. It’s a story bigger than resistance. It’s a story bigger than party or region.

It’s about work that means something and that makes you feel you mean something. It’s about a sense of place. A sense of purpose that can carry you through hard times.

This story can have an obstacle-a self-serving elite-but it need not have an enemy. As the psychologist Gordon Allport observed in his classic book The Nature of Prejudice, the desire for security within a group can be achieved without hostility toward an out-group. We just have to make it safe inside.

Which brings me to my second lesson: We’ve got to show each other how to say what we are scared of and what we are ashamed of. To name our pain. This, and not scapegoating, is how we can build bonds that will truly liberate us. This point hit me last week when I was speaking at Civic Hall in New York. During the Q & A, a young African American woman asked for counsel on how to speak about politics to her relatives in Georgia who supported Trump and who were repelled by her liberal views.

My suggestion was not to speak about politics, at least politics as we know it, but rather to speak about her fears. To explain to her kin why she is afraid of persecution or condescension, to reveal in what ways she is insecure and where she is trying to shield a weakness or a wound,to own up to her own failings. This is to lead by example. To invite others to drop their guard. We all have been imprisoned by our histories, and we so often disrespect others to remedy the deficit of respect we have experienced.

The night I was at Civic Hall, I had to miss another event going on uptown at historic Riverside Church-a commemoration of the speech Martin Luther King Jr. had delivered there fifty years earlier, in which he spoke out for the first time against the Vietnam War, and tied the civil rights struggle to the antiwar struggle.

That speech made him immensely unpopular in many quarters- LBJ disinvited him from the White House-and that is part of why it is important. It laid the groundwork for the Poor People’s Campaign that King set in motion the next year, in which civil rights and economic jus­ tice and peace would merge into a single revolutionary movement for respect. But then he was assassinated-a year to the day after his River­ side speech.

After his death, Americans came to sanctify a safer King, one who spoke of dreams in hopeful language and who could be used as a messenger of reconciliation and even colorblindness. The more radical, more fully awakened King that emerged late in life is less remembered but more necessary now. This King was unafraid to speak truth-both to power, and to his own allies in the fight against concentrated power.

And this is the third lesson I wish to share. Let’s be brutally honest about the challenges we face so that we can be brutally honest in our demands. In recent weeks I’ve noticed big, visually arresting signs being pasted onto buildings and street structures in Seattle’s Central District saying “WE DESERVE RENT CONTROL.” Perhaps so. But the blunt truth is,to quote a line used both in the Clint Eastwood Western Unf orgiven and in the HBO Baltimore crime series The Wire: “Deserve ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.”

If you want change, don’t make an appeal to just deserts. Make a map of who decides-whether it’s about rent control or homelessness or taxes or health care. Make a plan to locate and pressure those deciders, or to replace them or become one of them. Then make an alliance with others to mobilize the crowds, the money, the media attention, the social norms pressure, and the state actors needed to execute that plan.

I met last week with Dale Ho, who directs voting rights litigation for the national ACLU. He has a degree from Yale. And he’s using it to serve not himself but his Constitution.

His small but mighty team files lawsuits in every state where right­wing, white insiders are trying to rig the rules to keep young and non­ white outsiders from voting. It’s a daunting task but Dale is a calm dude. He has a plan to re-rig the game, state by state. Power concedes nothing without a demand, Frederick Douglass told us. Let me add that a demand means nothing without a plan.

RISK AND REWARD

At the start of the sermon I asked, What’s the difference between a promise you’ve never kept and a lie? I hope you’ve been pondering that asI’ve described this arc from dead sleep to willful dreaminess to full wakefulness.

I want to close now with another question: What will you do to deliver on the American promise?

All around us today, Americans young and old are getting activated for the first time or the first time in a long time. We don’t always know what we’re doing. But the important thing is  that we’re doing. We can teach each other how to do it-how to practice power-with more skill and wisdom. We can read books of strategy like mine and many others. We can learn by trial and error with joy and fellowship.

One thing each of us must do first, though, is to be clear about what we’re willing to lose. The risks of showing up and participating in times of upheaval are real: the risk of disappointment, of failure, of financial penalty or reputational damage or bodily harm.

But here’s the reward: living as if you were wide awake, fully human, and not alone. For the sake of our country and the ideas for which it stands, let’s take that chance.

 

 

Transcript for Sermon 6

AMERICA IS IN THE ACTS

One of the ways that Jena and I count ourselves lucky is that we have neighbors we love, who are good friends and something like family.

Some of them are here today. Our little block-not even quite fully a block, but more like a rectangle of homes-has something that is hard to describe, much less to replicate. It’s trust, to be sure. It’s also a spirit of mutual aid. We’re always helping each other, cooking for each other, taking each other to the light rail. It’s a sense of ease, making the street and sidewalks that separate our dwellings into a common area-an out­ door room-and not just a thoroughfare. But most of all, it’s a sense that we’re in this thing together.

I’ve been cherishing this good fortune lately because I know how little neighborly love there is in so much of this broad land. We are a people who’ve become isolated and atomized and insensate to the

human hearts aching and striving and singing right alongside our own. And in that isolation Americans have become susceptible to people selling untruth as truth, scapegoating as solution, and crisis as purpose.

I’ve also been thinking about what it means to be a neighbor because a week ago my Citizen University colleagues and I were in the other Washington. We were at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for two gatherings we had helped to organize. The first was a meeting of the Civic Collaboratory, a mutual-aid society of catalytic civic leaders from the left and right who meet every quarter. The second was a leadership summit of campus leaders from ten colleges across the country.

Downstairs at the museum, there is an exhibition that our groups toured and that I wish every American could experience-and indeed, you can see much of it on the museum’s website. It’s a departure from Holocaust histories that focus on the Nazi machinery of state. Instead it focuses on everyday acts of complicity by ordinary people.

Friends betrayed friends, joining the mobs that ransacked the homes and businesses of Jews. Classmates informed on classmates, coworkers sent coworkers to the camps and took their possessions, out of jealousy or greed or a desire to please authority or the inability to resist the tide. The exhibition is called “Some Were Neighbors.”

Some are always neighbors. Indeed, whenever authoritarianism takes hold, its most effective agents are neighbors. There are only so many uniformed officers of the government. Only when the people become collaborators can the leviathan truly work. Their capacity for mutual aid must be redirected to mutual suspicion and containment.

All of that collaboration and complicity boils down to acts. To simple choices that then compound and become contagious.

Do you choose to rush to the airport to stand in solidarity with a refugee you never met who’s being detained without cause? Or do you choose to tell Homeland Security that you have suspicions about your Arab neighbor when in fact all you have is a beef with him about the property line or his noisy parties or something else so mundane?

Small acts. Small compromises. Small stands. Small choices that turn large tides. That’s what every nation’s culture is made of. Where do we find America today? In the infinite catalog of unseen and unrecorded acts that we the people commit. You-not just the president of the United States-have the power the rewrite that catalog.

I recently read a powerful article in New York magazine about life in Putin’s Russia. It was by a reporter named Michael Idov who’d been born in the Soviet Union but emigrated here as a child and returned for five years to write about Moscow. It began with an anecdote about

being in traffic on a Moscow highway when an ambulance siren started blaring. Instinctively, as an American, Idov expected cars to yield and make way. No one moved. The ambulance crawled along with everyone else. Why? The driver explained that  “Everyone knows ambulance drivers make money on the side selling VIP airport rides. Who knows who’s in that van right now?”

Who knows? The safe bet, the smart bet, was not to trust. And so it went. Idov chronicles the deep kleptocracy, the expectation of corruption that implicates you in the corruption, the absolutely self-fulfilling way that “everyone knows” life is just a series of bribes and betrayals.

Add a few laws pushed through by Putin to criminalize protest. A few mysterious deaths of dissident activists. The rest takes care of itself. The title of his piece is “Life After Trust.” It is a story of cynicism as a way of life. It is chilling.

What inoculates us from that kind of cynicism is acts, repeated acts of principle. We have to build our principle reflex into a principle mus­ cle. We can’t just have a twinge of conscience. We have to have bursts of it, sustained bursts that enable us to move great obstacles and sur­ mount high walls. We learn to trust by being trustworthy. We become trustworthy by trusting. I do not want to find out what Life After Trust is like in America.

This is a time to sharpen our moral faculties, to contemplate what we will do when principle is tested. This is what I told those student lead­ ers we organized at the Holocaust Museum. We were gathered on the day after the refugee ban was issued. The day after the president failed to mention Jews in his statement marking Holocaust Remembrance Day. The warning of history was self-evident but also sobering. In 1938 over 70 percent of Americans recognized that Germany was oppressing Jews-and over 70 percent opposed letting in any Jewish refugees.

Which is why no American politician, from Franklin Roosevelt down, felt the need to act with moral courage on behalf of the Jews. Their inaction became action. Our borders closed first in their hearts.

Which brings me to the final proposition to explore today.

AMERICA IS IN THE HEART

In 1942 a teenager named Gerda Weissmann was delivered from her hometown in Poland, via the trains of the Third Reich, to a Nazi labor camp in Czechoslovakia. Her parents had been sent in a different direction-to Auschwitz. She survived the extremity, the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, by holding on to a dream of a new life, by honing her will to live into something vivid. She dreamed of the small details of freedom, picturing the ball she would one day attend, and deciding whether to wear the red dress or the blue dress. She imagined her way to freedom.

When Gerda Weissmann was liberated at war’s end she was twenty­ one years old and weighed sixty-eight pounds. She had not had a bath in three years. Her hair had turned white. She was liberated by an American GI named Kurt Klein. He had been born in Germany, a Jew, and had fled to America to escape the Nazis. His parents too had been sent to Auschwitz, never to be heard from again.

When Kurt met Gerda, he did a simple thing that restored her to humanity: he held a door open for her. Gerda would eventually marry that GI Kurt Klein, move to America, and raise a family to live a life both extraordinary and beautifully ordinary. She wrote a bestselling memoir called All But My Life, which became an Oscar-winning film, and created a nonprofit called Citizenship Counts. She was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But as she says, she didn’t cure cancer. She wasn’t Mother Teresa. All she did was enjoy the simple freedom to be a wife and a mother and a grandmother, and to make friends who would become like family to her. A subsequent book she titled A Boring Evening at Home. That was her wish, her ambition: the humble, grateful experience of everyday freedom.

Gerda and I have become like family. She has a magical spirit in her heart and eyes. And I suppose she is drawn to my earnest idealism. She demands that I call her Grandma, instead of Mrs. Klein. And though we speak in the idioms of different generations, we are asking the same question. What does it mean to be American?

The other night I had dinner in Los Angeles with my friend Melvin Mar. Melvin is what they call a “showrunner.” He’s the creator of the pioneering and acclaimed ABC sitcom Fresh Off the Boat, about a Taiwanese American family, and another new sitcom called Speechless, centering on a boy with a disability that prevents him from speaking. And Melvin’s got other ideas for shows that will include the faces and voices of once-marginalized Americans into this most American format of myth-making.

Melvin told me something that his dad, an immigrant from the Toishan region of China, once said to him. It’s something I think many children of immigrants have heard at one time or another. It’s basically this: “You’re not of them, and they are not of you. Don’t kid yourself Keep your head down and don’t speak your mind.”

Thank God Melvin didn’t internalize that message. Thank God he believed he belonged and decided to make the change he wanted to see. His body of work embodies and literally broadcasts a message: I am of them, because they are of me. He is claiming America. He is redefining America by rewriting the storyline of who us is.

The next morning, I had breakfast with another such claimer and rewriter. My friend Jose Antonio Vargas, who I’ve spoken of before, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He is a creator of an organization called Define American, which is using popular culture and campus activism to spark more inclusive conversations about immigration reform. And he is perhaps America’s most famous undocumented immigrant.

Born in the Philippines, brought to the U.S. as a two-year-old, raised by his grandparents in California, growing up an average American suburban kid, Jose didn’t learn he was undocumented until he was in high school. He kept it a secret for many years, with the complicity and collaboration of teachers and neighbors and mentors and bosses. Then finally, a few years ago, he came out as undocumented in the New York Times. Since then he’s been a representative and a heat shield for other undocumented people. He is courage incarnate. And now, every day, he gets tweets from gleefully malicious Trump trolls telling him, “Tick tock-you’re getting deported any minute now.”

It’s true that Jose and eleven million other undocumented people in this country now live in great peril. His stress is palpable. And what made my heart hurt was hearing him say how much he loves this country-the only country he has ever known, the country to which he has contributed so much. Jose quoted the Filipino American novelist Carlos Bulosan yesterday, not in a flight of rhetorical fancy but to console himself. Wherever he may live, America is his heart. And all he wants is simply to enjoy freedom. To not have to look over his shoulder. To enjoy a boring evening at home.

So now I must ask: Does my love of Jose outweigh my belief in the rule of law? How do I reconcile what I just said about rules mattering with the fact that his residence here breaks the rules? Here’s how. I remember that ruleness is not what makes a rule legitimate. Justice is. And a rule that would deport Jose to the Philippines, where he has no memories or life and where the Trumpish strongman Rodrigo Duterte has set loose murderous vigilante gangs against journalists and dissidents, is unjust.

That was the day before yesterday. After a day of meetings and events, I flew home from LAX-a place Jose is now afraid to enter- to Sea-Tac, where seven days earlier a spontaneous throng of people arrived to defend not just the suddenly disfavored but the rule of law itself. I drove straight to Benaroya Hall to meet Jena and our friends and neighbors Tom and Barb. We heard a Seattle Symphony concert that opened with an ambitious project called “All of Us Belong.”

This project takes four pieces by the early-twentieth-century com­ poser Charles Ives that he combined into a symphony for New England holidays. Quiet dissonance and roiling storms of sound, all interleaved with snippets and faint echoes of old American folk tunes. Ives, if you don’t know the music, can be described as cacophony plus memory.

America, if you don’t know it, can be described the same way.

The performance Thursday night combined the music of Ives with images of and by many homeless Seattleites, projected onto a great screen. And it combined all that, in turn, with four gorgeous poems composed and read by Seattle’s first Civic Poet, Claudia Castro Luna. We read today her poem for the Fourth of July movement of the symphony. It moved me so much to hear the music of her words, the spirit of her Americanness: “We are equally susceptible to kindness and to cold.”

In the program for the performance it says “Home is Where the Art Is.” And with Jose in my heart, I scribbled on the program: What are we made of? Are we a cruel, indifferent people? Or a people with basic decency? Do we stand and speak when others won’t? Or do we too bend like serfs to power?

We Americans are made of more than fear. We are made of more than shame. We are made of more than loss and pain.

ODE TO JOY

I want to close with some words about joy.

Joy? Really? In these times? Yes, really. Not a Pollyanna joy that can’t or won’t see what’s dark and terrible out there. But a defiant joy. Last night in front of the new Trump hotel in DC there was a protest. It was a dance party. That’s what I’m talking about. At Citizen University we’ve launched a project called The Joy of Voting that’s bringing raucous creativity and art and fun communal rituals to voting in cities around the U.S.

Joy is not frivolity. Joy is the generative spirit that emerges when there is underlying trust, respect, imagination, openness. Joy is a symptom that we haven’t given in.

And we haven’t. Certainly the citizen surge of the last two weeks shows that. People are willing to fight. But it’s not just about fighting Trump. It’s about fighting the thing that feeds Trump, which is self-ful­ filling cynicism.

Don’t fall into doom loops of conspiracy theory and powerlessness. I can’t tell you how many people have asked me what I make of the article on Medium depicting the actions of Bannon and Trump as a dry run for a coup. De-staff agencies like State and Justice of their professionals. Stack decision-making councils like the NSC with loyal insiders and remove independent generals who could check them. Attack the courts. Lie incessantly. Enrich self. Punish minorities. Claim to represent the majority.

To be sure, these are all things the Trump circle is doing. And I know the weird thrill that smart people get when they read a piece that suggests sophisticated hidden motives and plans. But having worked in American government, I’m here to tell you: any inner-circle master plan cannot move very far or fast. Our institutions, though weak, are not so weak that they could be that easily captured. At the same time, they are just weak enough that they would be inefficient and unresponsive tools for would-be autocrats. The bureaucracy is a quagmire for the good and evil alike.

And in any case, the answer to world-class levels of cynicism is not more cynicism. We who believe in inclusion and integrity can’t out­ cynicism the likes of Bannon and Trump. We can out-believe them. We can out-love them, out-trust them, out-mobilize them, out-imagine them. Out-joy them. Have you ever seen Donald J. Trump smile with joy? He cannot. We must. We must do that at home. With our neighbors. With strangers we encounter face to face. And with strangers we can’t see or touch but can imagine.

Trump is weak, not strong. That’s why he has to use a strategy of chaos creation. The people are strong, not weak. That’s why we mustn’t panic. Persist, believe, organize. Do so with love, and with joy. In our laws, our acts, and our hearts, this land is our land.