Dear America,
I love you enough to tell you the truth.
I served this country in war, and I love this country with my whole heart. My love for America is not blind loyalty. It is the kind of love that refuses to look away when something precious is in danger.
If a person develops obesity, chronic illness, anxiety, pain, and heart disease at the same time, we do not assume five unrelated things went wrong.
We look for a common cause.
We examine the person’s diet, environment, habits, stress, sleep, family history, medications, and lifestyle. We look at the whole person because we understand something important:
The body is connected.
What affects one part can eventually affect everything else.
Yet when we look at society, we often do the opposite.
We separate everything.
Poverty is one problem.
Homelessness is another.
Crime is another.
Obesity is another.
Healthcare is another.
Education is another.
Political corruption is another.
Pollution is another.
Inequality is another.
Racism is another.
We create a department for each one. A committee for each one. A program for each one. An expert for each one.
Then we wonder why the problems keep coming back.
What if we are looking at society the wrong way?
What if society is not a collection of unrelated systems?
What if it is an organism?
And what if the problems we keep trying to solve are not the disease?
What if they are the symptoms?
Think about your own body.
If your temperature rises, you do not curse the thermometer. You do not blame it for making you sick. The thermometer is telling you something.
Something is wrong.
A fever is a signal.
Pain is a signal.
Swelling is a signal.
Fatigue is a signal.
The body speaks through symptoms.
Society does too.
When homelessness rises, society is speaking.
When chronic illness rises, society is speaking.
When people work full-time and still cannot afford housing, food, or healthcare, society is speaking.
When children’s futures are determined by their zip code, society is speaking.
When trust in our institutions collapses, society is speaking.
When our rivers, oceans, soil, forests, and wildlife deteriorate, society is speaking.
When communities carry the weight of poverty, incarceration, underfunded schools, and lost wealth generation after generation, society is speaking.
When veterans who served their country cannot get timely care, housing, or peace after they come home, society is speaking.
When people with mental illness are left untreated until they become a crisis for police, hospitals, or prisons, society is speaking.
When a single emergency—a car repair, illness, job loss, or rent increase—can destroy a family’s stability, society is speaking.
When suicide, loneliness, and despair increase while we are more connected by technology than ever before, society is speaking.
These are not merely statistics.
They are vital signs.
And perhaps we have become so accustomed to the symptoms that we have stopped asking what they are trying to tell us.
America, we have a cancer among us—a sickness that is hurting the nation from the inside out.
And like every cancer, it cannot be healed through denial.
It must be named.
It must be confronted.
It must be rooted out.
There is another problem: we keep treating the fruit.
Crime happens, so we punish criminals.
People become homeless, so we build shelters.
People become sick, so we treat the illness.
Children struggle in school, so we test them more.
People become poor, so we create programs for the poor.
Pollution increases, so we clean up the pollution.
Prices rise, so we offer assistance to help people survive the prices.
These responses may be necessary. They may relieve suffering. But they cannot be the whole answer.
We keep picking the fruit.
But the fruit keeps growing back.
At some point, we have to ask a different question:
What is happening at the root?
Because if the same problems continue appearing decade after decade, perhaps we are not dealing with a series of isolated bad outcomes.
Perhaps we are dealing with a system that keeps producing them.
For too long, we have talked mostly about what divides us. We have argued over race, politics, class, religion, history, and ideology. We have spent so much time deciding who is to blame that we have forgotten the work of becoming whole.
But healing is the work before us.
Every wound requires us to ask:
What happened?
How were people harmed?
Where are we now?
How do we stop the harm from continuing?
And what will it take to make the injured whole again?
Healing requires two things.
First, we must stop hurting one another.
Second, we must heal or help make the injured whole again.
You cannot heal a wound while continuing to inflict it. Neither can you heal a wound by pretending it never happened.
That is true of a person.
That is true of a family.
And that is true of a nation.
Recently, I visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I was moved to tears by the injustices that have been done to Black Americans in this country. I watched white people cry too—not because they hated America, but because they were seeing parts of its story they had never truly been taught.
That is where healing begins:
With truth.
America must be honest about the parts of its past that are difficult to admit, painful to remember, and even shameful to face.
We must be honest about slavery.
We must be honest about the Black Codes.
We must be honest about Jim Crow.
We must be honest about racial terror and lynching.
We must be honest about redlining and housing discrimination.
We must be honest about unequal schools.
We must be honest about discriminatory lending and employment discrimination.
We must be honest about voter suppression, poll taxes, literacy tests, and gerrymandering.
We must be honest about massacres such as Tulsa and Hamburg.
We must be honest about the exclusion of many Black Americans from opportunities that created wealth for others.
We must be honest about the ways law, policing, sentencing, and the courts have too often produced unequal outcomes.
This is not about making people alive today feel ashamed.
It is not about assigning personal guilt to people who did not create these systems.
It is about accepting responsibility to understand how yesterday shaped today.
Because it is not only that these things happened.
The consequences of those things are still with us.
A wound ignored does not disappear.
It festers.
A debt denied does not vanish.
It accumulates.
Pain that is never acknowledged becomes pain that is inherited.
We must also be honest about the present.
Racism did not end because slavery ended.
It did not end because Jim Crow ended.
It did not end because civil-rights laws were passed.
A disease can change forms without disappearing.
Today, there are efforts to make us blind again—to treat honest history as divisive, to remove the language and tools used to identify unequal treatment, and to suggest that naming racial injustice is itself the greater injustice.
Some of the things being done in our government today are not frightening because they are entirely new. They are frightening because America has seen versions of this impulse before: the impulse to erase the evidence, weaken protections, dismiss the reality of inequality, and call those who speak honestly about racism the source of division.
But removing the diagnosis does not heal the disease.
It only makes the disease harder to treat.
We cannot pretend that we do not see what is happening.
We must confront it openly, honestly, and without hatred.
Racism is not only a matter of individual hatred or cruel words. It can live in systems, laws, assumptions, funding decisions, school boundaries, lending practices, voting rules, employment opportunities, and in whose pain we choose to believe.
It can live in the gap between what a nation says it believes and what its people actually experience.
Many Americans speak about crime as though crime emerged from nowhere.
But America does not simply have a crime problem.
America has a poverty problem.
Too often, we focus on the effects while refusing to confront the causes. We build larger prisons while neglecting struggling schools. We increase penalties while ignoring despair. We attempt to police brokenness instead of preventing it.
Poverty is often treated as personal failure when it can be the predictable result of generations of barriers, exclusion, and lost opportunity.
When people cannot afford legal representation.
When a ticket becomes a suspended license, and a suspended license becomes repeated arrests because a person still has to get to work.
When a person cannot afford bail.
When a family cannot afford housing.
When neighborhoods lack investment.
When children inherit disadvantage instead of assets.
When wealth is extracted generation after generation without being restored.
The consequences eventually appear in every area of society.
The rich cannot fully isolate themselves from the consequences of poverty.
No wall is high enough.
No gate is strong enough.
No neighborhood is far enough removed.
When one part of the body suffers, eventually the whole body suffers.
When one part is neglected, eventually the whole body weakens.
This is true of a family.
This is true of a community.
This is true of a nation.
We must stop seeing ourselves as competing tribes and separate pieces.
We are one people sharing one future.
When we hurt part of the whole, we hurt the whole.
When we heal part of the whole, we heal the whole.
The work before us is not denial.
It is repair.
Not resentment.
Repair.
Not revenge.
Repair.
Not endless arguments about who deserves compassion.
Repair.
America, I still believe in you.
I believe that a nation strong enough to confront its failures is stronger than one that hides from them.
I believe truth is not the enemy of unity.
Truth is the path to unity.
I believe justice and mercy can walk together.
I believe healing is possible.
I believe reconciliation is possible.
I believe that we can become what we have always claimed to be.
But first, we must tell the truth.
Then, we must stop causing harm.
Then, we must help heal those who have been harmed.
Only then will America become whole.
With hope,
An American Who Still Believes
Anthony Palmer