What is America at its best?
We put this question to our team — to find out what version of America meets the potential of what we want America to be. Some of us answered, some didn’t. Some wondered if doing so could — in this America we’re living in right now — draw punishment from the powers that be.
Some looked at history and others the future and others, songs. Here’s what we said:
In my American history class, we learn about Columbus and the Arawaks, the Jim Crow South, and Vietnam. With each lesson there exists the insidious temptation of wishing away history’s blemishes, to believe America at its best is an America without hate or greed. But the best America isn’t a fantasy. It exists in the “however,” the “even though” of each of these lessons. It’s the resistance that rises alongside injustice. America, at its best, is a home for abolitionists, pacifists, protesters, and organizers; those who refuse to accept oppression as destiny. It is the Children’s March, the Palestinian Solidarity Marches, and the man who stood outside the White House with a candle every night against the Vietnam War. As Howard Zinn offers, “I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.”
— Doris Yu
America is at its best when neighbors are helping neighbors in building strong communities. I come from Appalachia where we all have to rely on each other to get by on a daily basis. We are proud of our communities and how we work together. I see that work being done on a larger scale here in Boston by mutual aid organizations, by organizers and community leaders (such as the late Caroline Chang), by organizations like the AACA (publisher of the Sampan), and by the protesters who are willing to leave the comfort of their homes to go out on the street and demand justice and equal rights for all. These people all have a vision of how America can be better, and they are brave and patriotic enough to share that vision with their communities and put in the work to build a better country.
— Harmony Witte
The United States of America at its best is its humanity, a kaleidoscope tapestry of contradictory images and chaotic sounds that somehow have always made frustrating sense. Its essence is in its people and how they respond to the darkest times. The late Representative John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat who served this nation for thirty-three years until his 2020 death, implored his frustrated constituents to “make good trouble.” From his formative work as a Civil Rights activist in the 1960s, including nearly losing his life in the bloody Selma to Montgomery Marches, he was among the best of us. The greatest among us are the activists, transcendalists, poets, dreamers, iconoclasts. Think John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things,” Miles Davis’s “Kind Of Blue,” and Stevie Wonder’s “Another Star” It’s Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The USA.” America at its best is innocence, experience, mercy, and limitless hope.
-Christopher John Stephens
At this moment in time, this question really asked me to reflect on why I moved here and that felt like lost thoughts. The idea of America is so different from our lived experiences of it. America feels like a mirror, and some see themselves in it more than others. Having lived here four years, I never really thought “this feels American.” More often, there is a strange familiarity resembling somewhere else: “This feels just like….” Being a foreigner in America feels so immensely local. Being in America is to constantly relate. There are so many different lived experiences. The image of America as a place where different groups relate and find affinity is, perhaps, America at its best.
— Mingjia Chen
America at its bare minimum should be a place where a diversity of ideas can be expressed, without fear of punishment: a place where the writer Mohammed el-Kurd can speak to a packed room in Harvard University, and where people objecting to abortion can rally their cause; where a protester can challenge sending weapons abroad, and where a citizen can argue her right to own a gun. America should also be a place where each person is afforded life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These qualities are not coincidentally also the qualities needed for America to be at its best. But throughout history — such as during the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, Japanese incarceration, McCarthy era, war on terror and destruction of Gaza — America has excluded many from “its best.” But hope – which America offers in abundance — can help us one day make America great — for all.
— Adam Smith
