Let America Be America Again

I was lucky.

I’d spent two months cooped up at my brother’s apartment in Kansas City from April-May 2020, sleeping on a free futon mattress I’d been bequeathed from a former RPCV in the KC metro area, waking up around 10 a.m. and researching my options for roughly two-three hours each day, followed by afternoons soaking in a bathtub, listening to music, reading, drinking too much wine, and generally being depressed. I couldn’t just ‘be’ present in the moment. I couldn’t just do nothing. I had to keep my mind active. Reflection was too sad a journey to wander down. If I hadn’t applied for a job, researched a new opportunity, or contacted another potential mentor for advice, I would have felt I had wasted the day. Sure, in such times of trouble there’s something to be said for doing nothing. I couldn’t. Not entirely anyway.

These were the early days in America when lockdowns were still in place and staying home was acceptable. For me though, I had no home anymore, or at least it felt that way. Just family and friends willing to take me in and no idea what I was going to do next. Thus, it was a period of discovery and scattershot attempts to determine next steps. A stream of applications sent to private and public sector employers, in most cases doing so with no real skin in the game. No real heart or feeling towards wanting the positions I was applying for. Just blindly going through the motions. To some degree, I think many of us returned Peace Corps volunteers were all doing the same back in those days. But what choice did we have? All 7,000+ of us were evacuated back to an America under lockdown and led by a narcissistic assclown in love with the finer cleaning capabilities of Lysol injections.

One must start somewhere. If it wasn’t job applications, it was researching graduate schools. The problem with this option was rearing its ugly corona-shaped mug and spreading itself everywhere in the world. What would grad school, or any school be like in the Fall of 2020 with this virus? Would I really want to attend classes virtually and deal with the helter skelter nature of the constantly evolving situation? No matter. Research was done, input into a Google spreadsheet, and over time, two options narrowed themselves down as relevant to my desires, interests, and future career goals. Motivation statements were written, both applications were completed, and in return I received the favorable news of admittance to both schools. But which to choose? Decisions that important to my future were not something I could easily make at that time, so I held off.

So why was I lucky?

One of my scattershot attempts to find work paid off. And it was doing something I would feel proud to be a part of. My due diligence led me to accepting a position managing a team of contact tracers for the Washington, D.C. Department of Public Health, helping to stem the pandemic tide. It led me back to the city I’d once lived in and loved before leaving for Peace Corps Rwanda. It led me back to all the friends I’d made who lived there.

I was offered this position late May, which was right around the time another potential opportunity arose. I was steered towards teaching English abroad from a friend who had taught in South Korea for one month many moons ago. He introduced me to another chap who had lived there for over a decade as an English teacher. In chatting with this gracious fellow, he was full of guidance on what it was like to live in Korea, teach there, and survive in the age of coronavirus. As everyone knows, Korea was handling the pandemic quite well after being one country with an initial headline-churning surge in cases. Finally, the recent granting of my TEFL teaching certificate from Peace Corps helped solidify this is a valid opportunity.

Summer of Confusion and Combustion

At this stage in late May, I moved back to Washington, D.C. and settled into a temporary English basement in my old neighborhood haunt, H Street NE. That day was May 20, 2020; the murder of George Floyd.

As I’ve grown older and lived in new places of varying diversity and culture, and especially due to my time in Rwanda, my feelings towards America had been evolving. This idea that America is exceptional which had been drilled into our heads as school children clearly had more than just a few cracks in it. In fact, it simply wasn’t true.

The richest nation in the world was bungling their handling of a pandemic while the place I was evacuated from—Rwanda—turned out to be a much safer place to be, and with only a fraction of America’s GDP, healthcare budget, and influence. What Rwanda did have was a collective society, care for one another’s well-being, trust in their government, and a well-coordinated response. Was I surprised the country was handling things well? Not really. I was proud and grateful I’d had the chance to live there.

Add into this mix of thoughts in my head, the deep and continuing history of racism that came to a head on that day in late May and led to months of protests that ignited worldwide and forced people to start having the types of uncomfortable conversations they had never wanted to have, myself included. And an American leader who did nothing but fan the flames of racial animosity and division. Did I want to stay in America? I wasn’t sure.

I had a front-row seat to America’s handling of the coronavirus that summer due to my position. And a front-row seat was not something anyone would have wanted. Locally, D.C. was one of the first territories (it should be a state!) to hire and roll out a contact tracing team and they did so quickly, professionally, and admirably considering the circumstances. Nationally, there was no direction or leadership from the top. Each state had to institute its own methods for response, whether that included mask mandates, contact tracing forces, lockdowns, or in too many instances, nothing at all.

When our teams in D.C. had a low workload (a good thing) because new daily positive cases were low, we could do nothing to assist with contact tracing for other states that were experiencing surges in cases, such as Arizona at the time. Why? Each state had its own system in place and those systems didn’t ‘speak’ to each other. It was grossly inefficient and exacerbated America’s bungled response.

The Federal government could have streamlined its response in relation to what is required to effectively test, trace, isolate, and quarantine. It could have utilized the vast network of at the time empty hotels across America to be contracted out for individuals that needed to isolate due to positive exposure or a positive test result. It could have provided free food to families that couldn’t afford not to work, even if they had been exposed. It could have enacted laws making it illegal to fire someone who had to isolate due to positive exposure, instead of promoting the opposite with draconian executive actions that shielded companies from the legal liability to protect workers from harm.

Meanwhile, back in my hometown of Sabetha, KS, people were being made fun of for wearing masks in public spaces. Heckled for caring about their fellow humans… Arguing for their freedom to be an asshole… Claiming coronavirus was no worse than the flu… I could go on and on.

Something about this America just didn’t feel right.

Que to Korea. A recruiter I had been in contact with informed me in mid-June of an available position starting in late August at a private English language academy in Busan, Korea. I had kept this option open moving forward, including all that the application process entailed (FBI background check, apostilled transcripts, TEFL certificates, visa processes, etc.) because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to stay in America. Perhaps it was the reverse culture shock in returning to a country that seemed foreign to me after my first time living abroad. Perhaps it was the knowledge that were I to stay there, I’d be working from home, getting tested weekly if I wanted to see friends, and otherwise living an isolated existence that I’m just not meant to live.

The opportunity to leave was a godsend. I told the recruiter I would only move to Korea if the position was in Busan. From my research, Busan was a city of 3.6 million, the second largest in Korea so it had a cosmopolitan, international angle, but more importantly, it had the ocean, beaches, seafood, and it was nestled in between Koreas many mountains. It seemed to me from my research to be that perfect combination of urban plus outdoor adventure around every bend. The country was also handling the pandemic better than almost anywhere else in the world. Life there was semi-normal. I could save just as much on an English-teaching salary there as I would have saved working from home in D.C. These things all turned out to be true.

It was also around this time that I made the decision to defer my start date for graduate school until the Fall of 2021. In a way, I was also making the decision to defer ‘making a decision’ because I still wasn’t entirely sure whether grad school was the right path, and I also wanted to keep an open mind towards teaching in Korea, what that entailed, how I would feel, and where it might lead me.

So, in late July I put in a two-week notice at my contact tracing position and on August 7, 2020, I began a new journey. But that’s for another post…  

I’ll leave you with three things.

First, I realized then that I had the privilege and luck to even have the option to leave when so many in America were suffering. So why not stay and aid in the country’s coronavirus response in a position that could be effective? Why not help contribute to ensuring new Presidential leadership and policy get put in place to end the needless death and suffering? Why choose to leave friends and family in a time of such uncertainty? To be blunt, my mental health came first. And my thoughts on America were like a pile of puzzle pieces that still haven’t been fully put back together again, even as I write this now, roughly one year later.

Second, direct your attention to this stellar quote focusing on hopes for a brighter future in America from Kiese Makeba Laymon, who wrote the following article in Vanity Fair on November 19, 2020 (please read it): “Much of the beauty here has been sacrificed, and most of it stolen. There is no commercial, doctor, or wellness regimen to smudge that truth. Home is gone, but there is responsible pleasure to be found in the wreckage, in the pathways of the wrecked, and in all the goodness beyond where we’ve been allowed to discover.”

Finally, takes some time to read and reflect on this Langston Hughes poem (below) entitled, ‘Let America Be America Again.’ It spoke to me then and still does to this day. America doesn’t need to “be great again.” It’s a constant struggle to improve. That’s what democracy is. That’s what democracy looks like. Hoping for some idealized version of the past when things were supposedly “great” is not the world I want to live in.

If you disagree or feel uncomfortable with this poem’s message, I urge you to do some research, speak to people who don’t have the same beliefs as you, determine your own heritage, ancestry, and just how ‘native’ you are, or if you have the privilege to do so, please, please travel abroad and gain some perspective.

I copied the full poem directly from Poets.org.

—-

Let America Be America Again

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!