I was recently watching The Lion King—the original, not the CG cash grab Disney churned out in 2019.
In that film, after the evil Scar orchestrates the murder of his brother, Mufasa, the king, Mufasa’s son, Simba, evades death and flees to the outskirts of Pride Rock, where he grows up as the carefree hippie charge of two vagabonds, Timon and Pumbaa.
Even though he’s the rightful heir to the throne, Simba has been gaslit into believing that he is responsible for his father’s death, and this shame keeps him from taking action and embracing his true identity as a king to a dying land that needs his leadership.
Only the sage baboon, Rafiki, is able to get through to Simba. His method is a mixture of harsh truths and tender affirmation. First he shows Simba a cool vision of his deceased father, who reminds Simba of his virtue and noble calling. Then he presents Simba with an analogy where he assaults him with his stick, sarcastically echoing Simba’s recent justification that the past doesn’t matter because it can’t be changed.
Simba: “What did you do that for?”
Rafiki: “It doesn’t matter! It’s in the past.”
Simba: “Yeah but, it still hurts.
Rafiki: “Ah yes, the past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it, or…learn from it.”
Rafiki takes another swing at Simba, who ducks this time and takes away Rafiki’s stick, having finally grasped the lesson.
Ryan Gallagher nails it in this excerpt from his essay:
“Rafiki reminds Simba that his past, his trauma, and his shame don’t define him. Indeed, up until the very end Scar attempts to use those lies to manipulate and shame Simba, sowing division among his coalition. The ruling class constantly attempts to break us down individually or tribally and weave a narrative of scarcity and division where there was once abundance and solidarity.
The prophet reminds us that we are good enough, that our identities are not defined by our past, trauma, income, weight, grades, race, gender identity, or citizenship status. Our identity is in our common humanity, and our inheritance is community and abundance.”
Past actions matter, but learning from the past matters just as much, maybe more.
You’re supposed to learn, and you’re supposed to change.
I realized one day that everything I believed was just an extension of someone else’s belief.
I was raised Catholic on the Alabama Gulf Coast, by loving parents who made their fair share of mistakes, but always had the purest of intentions. I was brought up religiously, attended Catholic school until I was 18, went to Mass every single Sunday, never stepped out of line legally, and was singularly focused on pleasing my parents and achieving external validation for societal and developmental goals that were expected of me:
I got good grades.
I got all my requisite Sacraments.
I went to confession.
I voted conservative.
I championed political positions based on church doctrine.
Those last two aren’t explicitly asked of you. You just kind of do it, if you’re reading between the lines. Being Catholic really became my entire identity. And no matter how normal or authentic I was outside of that—as a movie lover, a regular teenager, or a creative person—ultimately my decisions and outlook couldn’t escape that moral prism.
Then I went to college. Not just any college. I went to art school. My family supported (and paid for) my creative education at a university for creative careers. There, I met my best friends, I came more of age, and most importantly, I became more comfortable with who I was, outside of where I grew up. My friends validated my personality and attributes, never expected me to be anything else, and helped me grow into a more authentic version of myself.
I still went to Mass every Sunday, I still saw myself as the same guy, just more able to publicly explore this version of myself that I could only be in private for the first 18 years of my life. I still saw myself as a Catholic kid who was resisting the temptations of the world beyond my bubble, so while I was growing plenty and learning more about myself, I was still clinging to my old identity out of a sense of obligation.
Eventually, it cracked. After 12 or 13 years as an adult trying to reconcile dissonant parts of myself, I finally had to accept that I was trying to be someone that I simply no longer was. The double life was harming my self-image, and by extension, my marriage and my belief in my own agency and worth.
I became religiously agnostic, I became more politically progressive, I became more of who I naturally am, with less fear that who I was was something to be resisted or ashamed of. And as a result of this transition, I feel much more aligned in who I am as a person and as a man. I feel more empowered to make my own decisions, and by extension, I feel more empowered to guide others towards following their curiosity and cultivating their confidence in exploring who they authentically are.
I am of better service to myself and to my community because of this. And I believe what’s true for individuals is also true for nations.
The United Shames of America
This idea extends to America as well. Self-actualizing as a nation, living up to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, I think, means that instead of pretending that we have a perfect past, we instead acknowledge our failures as well as our successes.
Past failure doesn’t make you bad, it makes you flawed, and it should humble you; but more than anything, it should teach you how to be better, and empower you with the experience and empathy to move forward and do better today.
Without that hard look in the mirror, we can’t recognize our history for what it is, our policies for what they are, or our system for what it is: extremely flawed, and favorable to establishment, white, male interests.
It’s rich to me that we call Critical Race Theory a radical and alternate telling of history, when it is in fact the actual truth of our nation’s history. What we’ve been traditionally taught, what I was taught in school, is the real propaganda. The pro-American tale where we were always the good guys and we always had good reasons for doing what we did when it was nasty (the atomic bomb, Japanese-American internment).
Political reasons aside, it’s interesting the lengths to which we will go to avoid taking responsibility for the hurt we have caused others through ignorance or selfish action.
White people are still resistant to accept the true events of history in which their ancestors treated black and brown people as second class citizens, and how we have not fully healed as a nation until we can agree on the truth of history.
We haven’t fully addressed the way we treat immigrants in America, regardless of their legal status.
When a nation refuses to reflect honestly on its flaws, it becomes vulnerable to authoritarian impulses. We've seen this play out in real time.
Immigrants are being rounded up and deported, legal and undocumented alike, without their constitutionally guaranteed right to due process (yes, even undocumented individuals have a right to due process in America).
Any hint of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in federal institutions is being removed. These are mostly in the form of achievements or recognition of patriotic Americans who are also part of minority groups, scrubbing our history of anyone who isn’t white.
Today, supporters of President Donald Trump seem unbothered by the devastation that the administration has inflicted on the country, at home and abroad, in order to “own the libs.”
I recently read Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen. Here’s an excerpt on this topic:
“{Trump} promised that as a country we would no longer have to pretend to be better than we are – and that those who resisted this new call to ugliness would be marginalized.
In February 2018, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency that handles visas, green cards, and naturalization, revised its mission statement. It had begun, “USCIS secures America’s promise as a nation of immigrants.” The phrase “nation of immigrants,” which generations of Americans had learned as children, was, like most national myths and more than some, a lie: the United States was a settler colonialist nation whose economy was rooted in the enslavement of Africans forcibly brought to its shores.
The new statement dropped the phrase altogether. This had nothing to do with correcting a record – it was part of the Trumpian project to redefine America in nationalist, nativist terms.”
I mention Trump because what he is doing to America in his second term is the most nakedly authoritarian push I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, and probably in the lifetimes of most people living today; people who are too young to have experienced Germany under Adolf Hitler, or Italy under Benito Mussolini, but are old enough to remember Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare over domestic Communism, and certainly anyone alive today who has internet access and can see what Viktor Orbán has done to Hungary, Xi Jinping to China, and Vladimir Putin to Russia.
I truly do not understand how any intelligent person can look at those other countries, or those previous times in history, and not see the blatant similarities between those dark times and the earliest moves this administration has made to consolidate executive power.
I think many Trump voters will look back on this period in history and have a difficult time justifying their behavior. I don’t think they realize how poorly their actions will age. And I don’t think that they will ever admit that they made an error in judgement. I think many of them will go to their graves insisting that the cruelty and vengeance that defined the second Trump term was good for the country and produced a freer and more perfect union.
One thing is for sure, this period in history will cause at least some people to examine the state of things, nationally and personally:
How did it come to this?
How is it that this is where we’ve found ourselves?
Will we ever recognize the manipulation of policy by corporate interests?
Will we ever agree that taxing billionaires in order to provide a basic social safety net is good for the country?
Will we ever accept that not everyone in America is a Christian and that that’s okay?
Will we ever stop trying to control each other?
There is apparently a Japanese proverb that states:
”If you get on the wrong train, get off at the neatest station; the longer it takes you to get off, the more expensive the return trip will be.”
The sad reality is that we have not gotten off the train yet. We’ve sat down on the train, no longer even looking for an opportunity to get off. I’m not sure we even care where the train is going at all anymore. We seem unbothered by its direction and ignorant of the consequences of the course we are on.
Unfortunately, most people need a rock bottom before they will acknowledge that they need to change. Lives have to be destroyed and relationships badly damaged or worse before many of us will finally have the motivation to clean up our act. By then, it’s often too late for what has been lost, even if we straighten up and make better choices going forward.
How Do We Move Forward?
What can we do to motivate people to look at themselves and excise the bad? It used to be religion, but now religion has been co-opted by politics and class identity. I can’t even suggest philosophy to people without being aggressively probed about why I’m not going to church anymore and how I’m not in a position to lecture anyone about morality. Perhaps I’m not. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion.
But I think I’ve earned the right to speak my peace on authenticity.
You can’t be your best if you are stuck living a lie. You can’t channel your efforts into meaningful living if you’re diverting resources towards maintaining a facade. You can’t move forward in your real identity if you can’t acknowledge where you’ve gone wrong or done harm in the past.
My faith wasn’t always a facade. But when it became one, I ignored it. I knew how to defend it, but I no longer believed in it. That’s a demoralizing way to live. It takes away your self-respect to live that way, and it robs you of the belief that you can make a difference when you can’t even be honest with yourself.
America’s greatness is a facade. Yes, our country has done a lot of good in the world, and in many ways, we are the envy of the world, and everyone wants to come here because it’s the shining city on the hill. That’s all true.
But it’s also true that we’ve done great harm; and rather than admit that harm, we continue to perpetuate it every day.
We elect shitheads to public office because they validate our ignorance.
We shit on journalists for trying to tell us the truth and holding the powerful to account.
We complain when we’re asked to give a modicum of our money towards public works programs.
We refuse to give every citizen healthcare free of charge because they don’t work hard enough.
We give corporations personhood so that elites can escape paying their share of taxes.
We flippantly muse about annexing other countries.
We suppress minority votes.
We look the other way when bad things are happening to people we don’t know.
We excuse lying and malfeasance in the name of partisan peacocking.
There are groups of people who have known for a very long time that The United States of America is masquerading as a moral country. Not only do I think that number has grown among Americans in recent years, but it’s grown exponentially in the last 3 months.
We are no longer seen as trustworthy trade partners. We are not viewed as reliable military allies. We are not considered the shining city on the hill because our lies and our hypocrisy are rapidly catching up to us. We know we’re full of shit, even if we have pretended for decades that we are not. Now everyone else knows it.
What do we do?
I think we do what people have done on a personal level whenever they realize they can’t keep up the facade: We admit it.
You have to call a spade a spade. It’s painful to not only admit that you made a mistake, but that your mistake may have ruined other people’s lives. It can be difficult to feel like everyone who calls you a bad person now has more of a leg to stand on. But accountability is leadership. It’s the right thing to do. And it’s what we should demand of our leaders.
But we can’t demand this of our leaders, who represent us, if we aren’t first willing to demand this of ourselves. We cannot control other people, but we can impose high ethical standards on ourselves. If we are able to do this, not only will we live a more fulfilling life and be of far greater service to others, but we will carry the self-assurance that we deserve this standard of anyone who we elect to represent our values, our interests, in public office.
In AA, you have to make amends. You have to accept that your addiction caused you to behave in ways that hurt others, and that those others deserve your contrition and your honesty. Whether those people forgive you or not is secondary to the point of the action: to take responsibility for your failures, for your mistakes, for your errors in judgment. The goal isn’t to be universally liked, that’s not realistic.
The goal is to own your mistakes and resolve to make better choices moving forward.
Is America capable of this? Today, I would say no, we are not. We are only capable as a whole of what we are capable of as individual Americans.
Some would say that our current leadership not only reflects what the voting electorate wants, but absolutely what it deserves: ethically bankrupt dipshits.
Others may say that while ethically bankrupt dipshits is what we’re stuck with for at least another 4 years (perhaps fewer dipshits total after the 2026 midterm elections), that the majority of Americans actually didn’t vote for the dipshittery that’s happening to us now.
If that’s true, then America may be closer to looking in that awful mirror than I thought.
But it won’t happen until we get ourselves out of this crisis, be truthful about what happened, why it happened, and finally admit that we cannot go on like this if we are to truly reach our potential as a beacon of freedom and opportunity.
In order to deserve better, we must do better.