America the beautiful. The land of my birth.
I left her almost thirty years ago — not because I stopped loving her, but because Mother Ganga called me home. And I have learned something in those thirty years that I could never have learned had I stayed: there is a particular kind of clarity that comes from loving a country from ten thousand miles away. You stop seeing her the way you see your own face in the mirror every morning — too close, too familiar to really see at all — and you begin to see her the way you’d see a beloved child who is growing up. Proud of who she has become. Honest about where she is still struggling. Willing and excited to continue to help guide and shape her. Distance did not make me love America less. It made me love her more clearly.
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We tend to celebrate American inventions — the telephone, electricity, a man on the moon, airplanes. But America’s truest and most powerful gift to the world is not any of these. Her real gift was an idea, and in 1776 it was almost a laughable one: that ordinary people, with no king and no bloodline, could govern themselves. At a time when most of the world was ruled by monarchs and empires, a group of relatively ordinary people had the audacity to write down that all people are created equal, and to stake everything on it.
They did not live up to it. Many of them owned other human beings even as they wrote the words. The contradiction is impossible to ignore, and we shouldn’t try. But here is what I have come to understand: loving the light does not require us to pretend there is no shadow. The two are not mutually exclusive.
I have heard so many people say it isn’t patriotic to criticize. But when we love someone and quietly ignore all the ways they are falling short of who they are capable of being — that is not love. That is fear. That is obedience. A parent who never corrects a child is not loving that child more. They are loving that child less, because they are willing to tolerate that child never blossoming into the fullness of who they were meant to be. Real love always calls us higher. And a country, like a person, cannot heal a wound it refuses to admit it has.
This is the country that birthed Martin Luther King, Jr., who stood in front of extraordinary opposition because he knew we are equal. The same country that birthed Harriet Tubman, who walked back into the darkness again and again and again — not to save herself, she was already free — but so that others could have the light of freedom. The same country that birthed Rosa Parks, who simply stayed seated, knowing she deserved her place not only on this earth, but exactly where she was. These were not presidents or generals. They were ordinary people who decided that the gap between America’s promise and America’s reality was theirs to close. That is the real American genius — not the technology, but the courage of ordinary people to hold her accountable to her own foundation.
And yet, alongside all of that, America is also birthing something else right now. She is birthing division. On the basis of race, religion, color, political party, sexual orientation and so much more. Every year I travel back to the US, and I see the walls between us growing thicker. There was a time when we could at least agree to disagree. Now, for too many of us, “us and them” is no longer simply an awareness that someone believes differently. It has curdled into: if you are not with me, you are against me. And if you are against me, you are my enemy. I cannot talk to you. I cannot sit with you. Somewhere along the way, disagreement became enmity.
But this is not what the country was built on. It was built on a messy, argumentative, gloriously imperfect group of people figuring out how to make something new — and figuring it out together. What family, after all, agrees on anything? Disagreement was never the flaw in the design. Learning to live together and grow together despite differences was always the entire point.
And there is something else we have forgotten, something that runs even deeper than our politics. With the single exception of this land’s Indigenous peoples, every one of us is an immigrant. Every one of our families came across oceans and continents because they hoped for something better — for themselves, for their children, for grandchildren they would never meet. There is a beautiful teaching in the Indian tradition, Atithi Devo Bhava — the guest is divine. We may not carry that exact spiritual sensibility in America, and that’s all right. But we owe it to the very truth of where we come from — to our ancestors, and to those for whom we will one day be the ancestors — to remember that welcoming the stranger is not a departure from who we are. It is the very thing we are made of.
A country founded on life and liberty and justice for all cannot, today, be a place where too many people are unequal, unhoused, without healthcare, without access to education, afraid to walk out of their own front doors. Naming that is not an attack on America. It is the most patriotic thing there is. You only bother to fix what you love.
It’s so tempting to slide into rage and outrage. There is so much to be angry about — real injustice, real suffering, real wounds that have gone unhealed and untended for far too long, and to feel nothing in the face of them would be to fail ourselves as human beings. But rage, for all its fire, was never meant to be where we live or our problem-solving tool. It is the alarm bell, not the fire extinguisher — the instigator that wakes us up and reminds us there is work to be done, the beginning of the road and not its end. Because rage itself has never healed anything. No family in the history of the world ever mended itself by shouting across the dining table. The harder, holier work is to sit back down at that table with someone you disagree with, and to remember that they are not your enemy. They are your sister. Your neighbor. Your fellow passenger on this planet. According to India’s spiritual tradition – they ARE you, inseparable from the soul of you.
Because before we are Democrats or Republicans, before we are any color or creed, before we choose to vaccinate or not, before we pick our sides in the latest conflict — we are human beings. Then Americans. And everything else comes after that. When we lead with the labels, we cannot see each other at all. When we lead with our shared humanity, the labels soften back into what they were always meant to be: interesting differences, rather than dividing lines.
So as she turns two hundred and fifty, my prayer is not that America becomes stronger, or wealthier, or able to destroy the world more times over than any other country. Real leadership was never defined by that. My prayer is that we become kinder. More courageous. More willing to choose one another over the cheap comfort of division. Because what has always made America beautiful is not her rolling hills — lots of places in the world have rolling hills. What makes her beautiful is us, and only ever us, when we choose to heal her and build her together.
Two hundred and fifty years is young for a country. She is still becoming what she promised to be. And I believe, with my whole heart, that she can — if we remember that we were always, always on the same side.
Happy birthday, America. To you, and to all of us.
I shared these reflections in a short video recorded for America’s 250th. I hope you’ll take a few moments to watch — and to join me in imagining not only the America we’ve inherited, but the one we still have the chance to become and to leave for our children and grandchildren.
