Dear America, 

By Anshruta Chidananda

Dear America,

You are a blank sheet of paper, but I see potential in you. Your thin structure makes you appear as though you are two-dimensional, but you’re multifaceted. Your diversity helps accentuate your various dimensions, transforming you into a thick canvas, a blindingly white landscape, peaceful and eagerly awaiting to be painted with portraits of who and what you stand for. Who do you stand for?

A suburban family of four with a baby girl being carried by her dad, as her brother, a toddler, pets their golden retriever? An elderly woman standing in front of her small brick house, watering purple hyacinths lining the railing of her porch? A couple in their newly purchased studio apartment, empty apart from two bowls of ramen noodles steaming in front of them? A man huddled in a forest green sleeping bag, resting next to shopping cart piled with clothes and groceries? A toddler in the south of Texas clenching a red baseball cap with the phone number of his aunt? As I continue to watch the viscous paints blend together, forming portraits of families and individuals, privilege and struggle, people in search of new beginnings, I can’t help but notice the various paints, once complementing each other, now appearing as mud. Chunky, murky, you’re starting to look dismal.

The bristles on the paintbrush that stroke your canvas are comprised of cracked, trembling hands, sore backs and aching muscles, veins popping out of foreheads, working paycheck-to-paycheck. Some are undocumented, yet all unrecognized. These bristles, these people, hardly ever get to paint the signature in the bottom right corner of the canvas that credits itself in the work and result of the masterpiece.

Green gets the credit. Green buys privilege. Green spends their time at country clubs and golf courses. Green is thin, wrinkled, and two-dimensional, yet setting the rules, leading the corporations, leading the country.

You are too primed or not primed enough. Your underlying shallowness is showing through, transforming you back into a thin piece of paper. I want to tear you, yet I can’t get myself to do so. I admire the way your colors once gently flowed, though I worry that you’ve now ruined your landscape by coating yourself in a dismal color. I try to look away, but painfully watch as you tear yourself to pieces. You show as many red hats and white cloaks holding a knife to the throat of Lady Liberty as there are a myriad of fists in the air, signs in hand, demanding equity. In an attempt to connect your multitude of rips, I trace a small stick of glue over your tears and hold the pieces together. Theoretically, the pasty glue should repair your division, but my fingers gently trace the jagged lines between your partially connected rips and tears. Your strong division makes me tremble. I am uncertain of the future pictures to be painted on you. I worry of increasingly frequent unprovoked physical attacks towards minorities, having to live in fear as new-age minutemen emerge, violent demonstrations transitioning into a modern Civil War, the demise of what was meant to be the land of the free. At the same time, I hope for more understanding. More understanding regarding the purpose and urgency of certain movements. More understanding that will, hopefully, lead to more collective agreement. Clear communication will move you forward, swift strokes of soft bristles as they grace you. Until the future arrives, I am reminded of the pictures that you painted for me.

“Do you know English? Where are you really from?” Layers of compact ignorance encompassed a single stone as it broke through our storm door on a day in 2003. The shattered pieces of glass that once made up the door laid glistening on our brown hardwood floor. Shards of glass as transparent as our former neighbors’ ill will towards us. The stone snickered at my family and me as it viewed the aftermath of its destruction, while its owners sped off, leaving us hatred as a final goodbye.

It stings when your thin, sharp edges slash against my brown skin. It aches when your racist remarks as shallow as your thin structure mock Asian communities. It kills when the weight of your ignorance crushes melanin necks. Seeing that glue didn’t work, I’m trying to fold you together now, piece by piece, in an attempt to fix your rips. When will you come together again? Were you ever truly unified in the first place? While you may have been together on the surface, unified by Super Bowls (and their ads) and other friendly sporting events, cute videos of animals, and the collectively agreed need to fill all of the random potholes in the roads, I realized that, foundationally, you were never together to begin with. Still, despite the rigidity of the paintbrush bristles, I believe that, overtime, they’ll work together to change you for the better. Some of your bright-minded constituents are teaming up to create more innovations to improve you, technologically, environmentally, medically. Younger generations are joining long-time activists in amplifying long-awaited conversations about intersectionality, from race and ethnicity to gender and sexuality; identity is becoming more clearly identified. It’s through experiences of ignorance, personal and those heard from social media or news outlets, that I realized your desperate need for those who are empathetic and willing to listen. Together, those traits breed understanding, better communication, and unity.

That being said, I cannot force you to ingest every word that leaves my mouth; the strokes of a paintbrush should move freely. With that, I hope for the open-mindedness of your constituents, for them to find common ground on major, rather fundamental issues, on a nationwide scale. But remember to be patient; your journey to unity isn’t quick, though I can see that it’s started. As one of the millions that comprises you, I’m trying to improve my own open-mindedness and activism efforts: I’ve spent some of my Summer 2020 signing petitions and sharing resources on social media to educate about or donate to various causes. Friends were joining protests in the streets and doing the same. Despite the dismal color that you are currently coated in, and your structure riddled with rips, I still believe in the paint continuing to flow down until your true self, a thick, bright white canvas, shows again, ready to start anew.

Until then, may you be temporarily fixed by your superficial joys: tailgate parties and barbeques, complaining about taxes, love for a good bargain, and indulging in artery-clogging “delicacies”. While your union is not perfect in the slightest, this imperfection is one of your strongest traits. I know that you’re trying to improve, and I am optimistic that, as a nation, you will overcome your divide eventually. The obstacles facing your way, the disagreements and conflicts, are no match for the pure grit of you and those who define you. After all, a nation that can survive on deep-fried Oreos and fried Twinkies is a nation built tough.