Independence Day

“Our lives begin to end the day we remain silent on things that matter.”

 – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Around the world, about 225 countries have a day they claimed their sovereignty in one form or another. More than 160 of them celebrate that day annually. 243 years ago, America became an independent country. It was the rise of a new nation. We claimed our freedom from our English parent with the rousing words, “All men are created equal.”

All people are created equal, but they’re not all treated equal. That is true of the human condition the world over throughout all time. We have it all here. We are a country of contradictions. We fought for our freedom from an oppressive monarchy and wiped out the people who lived here before us. We enjoyed our freedom as we took it from others and forced them into slavery. In some states, men can marry men and women can marry women. All over the nation people of every creed, color or religion can work together, live together, love, hate the same things, and argue without killing one another, usually. We can get better though, and I believe even through these times we live in now, we will.

America is a great country. I believe that with all my heart, but I also know it tends to be greater if you’re white, if you’re male and if you’re heterosexual. Even greater if you’re rich.

We are a complicated people. As we celebrate our freedom today, little brown-skinned children, whose parents were seeking a better place for them to grow, rot in cages in Texas and Arizona. In some parts of this great nation, a woman who is raped must not only live with the terror of being raped, but the sentence of the life growing inside her. In America today, a man or woman of color who gets pulled over runs the risk of getting shot to death, even if they run away.

No heterosexual has ever had to hide that fact. No straight man has ever had to worry that his liking women would get him beat up, ostracized from his family, or murdered. People want to be free to determine the course of their own lives and to do so without fear.

America is a great country. I love it, but my love is not blind. We have problems. We are not perfect and what country ever is? Loving requires open eyes. We have been the hero at times, and at others, we have not. We are going through a tough time as a nation and it is at times such as these that we need to think about what we are doing, about what we are allowing. I love this country for all the things that it can be. I believe we can be better. We’re by far not the worst place in the world, but that shouldn’t stop us from improving. Yes, we can be great. If we don’t look at ourselves honestly, see where we were wrong in the past, and where we’re wrong now, then how can we even be good?

When the idea of something is greater than its reality, raise the reality to meet the idea.

Some people might be angry with what I’ve said here, yes. I understand that. I don’t like looking at my flaws, I certainly don’t like them pointed out to me. I don’t think anyone does, but you don’t strengthen the foundation of your home by ignoring the cracks. You see them, you point them out, you see how deep they are and then you fix them. We have been great, yes, but only for some, now let’s be great for all.

But this blog is supposed to be about writing right? It is. All of it is. Writing is thinking. Thinking is freedom. When a person can think for him or herself, then they can act for themselves.  

Naming something is a form of writing, even if you never put a pen to paper. When you assign a word to identify someone, you are naming and you are writing that name in your mind and in the mind of everyone else who uses that name. 

When I was in second grade, I had the nickname, “Chip.” School kids loved it. I hated it. I was teased and taunted, and not being much of a fighter at the time, I decided to handle it a different way. I went to my mom after school one day and told her I wanted to be called “Chad,” instead of Chip. I made my case and to my surprise, it worked. The next day, my mother and I went to the school and told the officials I would go by “Chad” from then on. We were only changing my nickname, my legal name, which didn’t seem to fit me then, would not change.

For twenty plus years, I was Chad, and Chad was an angry, narrow-minded man. I moved to Arizona where I met a woman who was into East Indian meditations, Zen meditation. I was attracted to her so naturally I decided to try it. I had a lot of unresolved issues at that time and I didn’t know what to do with them, or in fact, how to identify them. Meditation changed my life, and I changed my name again, (though not legally). I was editing myself and I didn’t know it.  

I meditated every single day. It was tumultuous time for me mentally. I had a narrow view of the world then and my place in it. Despite the meditation I was still stuck, trapped in a room where the walls closed in. I couldn’t get out of it. So I did every kind of meditation, cathartic, dancing, and sitting in absolute silence. I watched my ego dissolve to some degree then. I was hungry to learn more so I submitted my name and my photo to an ashram in Poona, India and received the name, Kranti Chaitanyo. The name was meant to be a message for me, its meaning; “Revolution of Consciousness.”

Asking people to call you by a different name several times in your life is, of course, a bit drastic and a little ridiculous. But for me, at that time in my life, I felt it was necessary. As strange as it sounds, I never felt like me. So I took the message of that strange name to heart and changed from Chad, to Chai. The meditations helped me become more aware, and helped me to identify my anger and how I was projecting it onto others. I learned to take ownership of my pain and to learn from it. None of this was easy.

I went by Chai for about ten years. Then I went to college, where I rediscovered my love of writing and took all the courses on it that I could. When I graduated and began working in the professional world, I was ready to accept the name I’d avoided my whole life, the name I was born with, Albert. As I rewrote my name, I rewrote my life. A constant work in progress, but one for which I could be proud.

What does my changing my name have to do with America or writing? Everything. Each and every one of us here lives a journey uniquely American. Regardless of how we got here, whether we were born here or brought by our parents or moved here seeking a better life. Our lives are written in the story of this country, now and forever.

For so many years, I was not free in my own head. despite all that meditation, despite all the ways in which I’d learned to examine my thoughts, my feelings and my impulses I was still so often a little kid stuck in a room. Writing made me free. It makes me free.

Writing is the sword to slay monsters. It can break the chains of the mind.

Our ideals must be continuously earned. Freedom, like consciousness is an ongoing exercise in staying awake. I had to become independent from my past self, and even from my projected future self. We are in constant rebirth from the moment we come crying from our mother’s wombs. We write and rewrite our lives every day.

We are all America, and each of us has to fight for the freedom to be ourselves. Sometimes the best freedom is escaping your own mind, or getting away from bad habits, the thousand tiny strings that tie us to where we were and keep us from being where we want to be. Freedom is not letting something or someone else define you. Only we can determine who we are. Freedom isn’t a song, or a salute, it’s the heart of every living thing. Freedom is being alive.

We are all America. This is our time to acknowledge our failures, our shortcomings, look our fear in the face, and move forward. Freedom isn’t afraid. Freedom is about being knocked down and getting back up again. It doesn’t matter how many times we fall, or how many times we fail, we have to get back up. Just get the fuck back up.

We are all America. Freedom is always do or die. It’s when the odds are against you, when all signs point to failure, that’s when you get back up. Independence is not about winning and losing, it’s about standing up when you want to sit down. It’s about rising to that moment when you think you can’t do it, that you can’t make it, or that you can’t be the one.

You are the one. We all are.