The People Here
I love the way people here carry themselves.
That’s all I really want to say today, on America’s 250th. There’s a specific flavor of dignity here that I love, that I appreciate more every time I travel and come back home.
This is a huge country, spanning from an ocean to an ocean — so big, it almost doesn’t make sense to talk generally — but I think this is a tie that binds us. Dignity looks different here than it does in Iceland or Portugal. I can only guess why, but I can tell you that I think it’s beautiful.
I call it dignity and not freedom because it doesn’t require being free. None of us here is really free. Our rights are precarious. But the American spirit of dignity exists in spite of the precariousness. It’s what we give ourselves when the big structure of every-American-together doesn’t give us freedom. I think it’s the difference between feeling free and being free.
And it does have something to do with our systems and our values, real and mythological, anyway. It’s not a total lie when some say that people in other countries envy us. They don’t just envy cheap Coke. They envy the way you walk. And their envy is well-earned even while we have a burning-hot, emergency need to stop ICE’s ethnic cleansing, address the legacy of slavery, provide for each other’s health, heal our crises of addiction, stop subjugating people in faraway lands, and on and on.
Why talk about American dignity? Because I think it’s part of acknowledging how ordinary people, or the majority, really feel and really relate to the state. We run a real risk, us artists, of focusing too much on a circle jerk of national shame, and not enough on meeting everyone where they’re at, and energizing ourselves to defend each other’s rights.
So on the 250th anniversary of this bizarre nation, which is a fiction with teeth, I want to say: I love the people here and the way they carry themselves, which feels peculiarly free, and which you can go to any hotel breakfast buffet to see, a living flower of our values.