We Are Not One People; We Have Never Been

A Lament for the Union That Never Was

Prelude: The Ache of Disillusionment

This is not easy to say.

I wish it weren’t true. I wish I could begin with a hymn to unity, a flag catching soft wind, the soundtrack of shared memory playing somewhere behind the words. I wish I could tell you that despite the rage and recriminations, despite the noise and the silence, we are still one people.

But the union I believed in turned out to be a story told over the bones of others.

Something broke. Quietly, without ceremony. No final straw, no headline to mark the shift. Just a slow, soul-deep shattering—a realization that the story we were raised on may have never been real. That the dream we were living in was more fable than fact. That the unity we assumed, clung to, hoped for… was a mirage reflected in myth.

If that hurts, that is good. It means you’re not becoming numb.

This is not written in rage. This is not a call to arms. It is a lament. A civic grief. The kind that settles in after the rally signs are packed away, after the headlines scroll past, after a friend you trusted posts something cruel. I felt it the night a man I’ve known for decades laughed at a child in a cage and said, “That’s what they get.”

That’s when it hit me: the grief isn’t over what was done to me. It’s over what was never there to begin with.

I believed in the idea of America—not the politics, but the poetry. I believed that Ellis Island meant welcome, that protest meant progress, that the flag could cover us all. I believed that our sins were being slowly redeemed by the arc of history.

But now I see it differently. Not with bitterness, but with clarity.

We have never been one people. We have been peoples—plural, parallel, often pitted against each other. Sometimes striving, sometimes surviving, sometimes severed completely. And through it all, we told ourselves one fragile lie: that unity was already ours.

I don’t write this to condemn. I write it because naming the break is the first act of healing.

There is no shame in waking up from a dream—only in refusing to see daylight.

Maybe it’s time to write a new one.

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The Myth We Were Told

“One nation, under God, indivisible…”

We taught it with our hands over our hearts and our eyes closed to history.
Not a promise fulfilled—but a hope recited.
A spell we cast to silence the truth.

From the beginning, the American experiment has rested on a contradiction: the poetry of unity layered over the machinery of exclusion. “We the People” sounded noble—until you looked too closely at who got counted, and who did not.

The Constitution, that hallowed parchment of liberty, was signed by men who meant “people like us.” Liberty was never the default. It was rationed. And often, it was stolen.

We displaced and called it destiny.
We enslaved and called it economics.
We segregated and called it safety.
We gerrymandered and called it democracy.
We suppressed votes and called it integrity.
We criminalized poverty and called it law and order.

These weren’t just policies. They were boundaries—drawn and redrawn to mark who belonged, and who did not.

The “we” of America has always been a moving target—expanded by struggle, contracted by fear, and manipulated by those who profit from division. Each time new voices demanded inclusion, the powerful responded with delay, dilution, or outright denial.

Jim Crow wasn’t just a Southern quirk—it was a national agreement.
Redlining didn’t just isolate neighborhoods—it insured generational poverty.
The Southern Strategy wasn’t subtle—it was segregation by another name.
And today’s voter suppression isn’t new—it’s just more polite.

Unity, we were told, was already ours. But it wasn’t. It never was.
It was something the powerful pretended to bestow while holding the keys to the gate.

And so the myth endured.

We told ourselves the country was whole—while it bled.
We called ourselves united—while neighbors lived in fear.
We taught our children to love a flag—without teaching them who it had failed.

What we call polarization is often just history returning in full voice. The reckoning was always coming. We were just too busy mythologizing ourselves to hear it.

We have never been one people. We have been a patchwork stitched with contradiction—some threads of justice, many of cruelty.

But unity is not born of silence. It is born of reckoning.

And reckoning starts with myth undone.

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The Cost of Pretending

There is a particular violence in pretending everything is fine.

Not the loud violence of war or riot—but the quiet kind. The respectable kind. The kind that wears a flag pin and speaks in moderate tones. The kind that calls for “civility” while standing on someone else’s neck. The kind that asks the wounded to whisper, so the comfortable don’t have to hear the truth.

That is the cost of the unity myth.
Not just its falsehood—but the damage it does when we insist on living inside it.

Because when we pretend we’re already one people, dissent sounds like division.
Protest looks like betrayal.
Accountability feels like attack.
History becomes a threat.

We’ve heard it all before—“Don’t be so negative.” “That was a long time ago.” “You’re just making it worse.”

No. We’re not making it worse. We’re making it visible.

False unity doesn’t heal. It hides.
And what hides, festers.

Pretending we are united is like painting a house while the foundation rots—bright, presentable, doomed.
The façade becomes more important than the structure.
The performance becomes more sacred than the people.

And so the myth becomes a weapon—not of hope, but of erasure.
It tells the comfortable they’re right to look away.
It tells the hurting to be quiet and grateful.
It treats outrage like incivility and silence like virtue.
It puts reconciliation before truth, and performance before justice.

It asks the broken to dance for healing before they’ve even been allowed to name their wounds.

Worse still, it creates a false equivalence. It suggests that all grievances are equal, all perspectives valid, all histories interchangeable. As if centuries of dispossession could be weighed against a few years of discomfort. As if asking to breathe freely in your own skin is just one side of a “debate.”

We are told to seek common ground. But some of that ground is soaked in blood.
And some things are not meant to be bridged—they are meant to be confronted.

We wring our hands about polarization, without mourning the centuries of pain that made it inevitable.
We call this moment a fracture, but division was designed. It was baked into the foundation, hidden behind patriotic wallpaper, and passed off as normal.

It is not new. It is merely visible.

We called silence peace, and called peace silence.
We mistook quiet for harmony, and harmony for consent.

The myth of unity doesn’t only gaslight the oppressed—it sedates the privileged.
It lulls us into thinking we’re further along than we are, that the work is done, that the house is whole.

But a wound ignored will never close. And a country built on amnesia will never be healed.

The cost of pretending is not just moral—it is existential. Because when a nation builds its identity on denial, the truth becomes ungovernable. It comes back louder, sharper, more furious than it ever had to be.

The only thing more dangerous than a fractured people is a people who believe they are whole when they are not.

Wholeness doesn’t come from pretending the wound was never there.
It comes from learning how to live with the scar—and choosing not to pass it on.

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The Grief of Knowing

Some grief doesn’t come when something ends—it comes when you finally see what never began.

It’s not the grief of death or defeat. It’s the grief that follows clarity. The grief that arrives slowly, like fog lifting from a familiar road—only to reveal that the road never led where you thought it did.

That’s the grief many of us carry now. Not just over what has happened, but over what never was. The dream we were taught. The country we believed we lived in. The quiet faith that, for all its faults, America was still moving—haltingly, unevenly—toward something better.

We weren’t naïve. We knew the founding had blood in its ink. We knew the sins of conquest, enslavement, exclusion. But we believed that progress was real. We believed in the blossom. We believed that the arc of the moral universe was long and still, somehow, bending.

And then came the cold light.

At first, you make excuses. You say it’s just a fringe. You tell yourself the center will hold. You want to believe this is still your country—just going through something.

But then cruelty becomes a campaign strategy.
Lies win applause.
Neighbors you love begin to speak with a venom you don’t recognize.
People you trusted share mockery instead of mercy—jokes about the hungry, cheers for the cage, silence for the lynched.

And that’s when the grief sets in.

Not just over them. Over us.
Over who we thought we were.
Over how much of this was always here—hidden in code, buried in dog whistles, waiting for permission.

You begin to wonder: Was the dream just mine?
You begin to ache, not because you were wrong—but because you wanted so badly to be right.

That’s the ache Baldwin knew.

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious,” he wrote, “is to be in a rage almost all the time.”
But rage, in Baldwin’s voice, was never just fire. It was the aftershock of grief. It was the ache of seeing clearly and being told to lie anyway.

That ache belongs to many of us now.

Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
You can’t un-hear the laughter at suffering.
You can’t un-know the indifference to death, the ease with which humanity gets turned into political inconvenience.

And so you carry the weight—not of a lost country, but of a country that maybe never was.
You carry the weight of having to choose: do I shut my eyes again and pretend, or do I mourn—and move forward anyway?

This moment doesn’t call for positivity.
It doesn’t call for tidy hope or the illusion of resilience.
It calls for mourning. And after mourning, meaning.

Because grief, if we let it, becomes a kind of furnace.
It burns off illusion.
It clarifies.
It humbles.
And if we have the courage to stand within its heat, it might even prepare us for the work ahead.

What do you do with a dream that no longer fits the facts?

You don’t discard it.
You don’t cling to it, either.

You light a candle for the dream.
You sit with the silence.
You let the ache do its work.
You hold a vigil in your soul for the country that never was—
and then, slowly, with others beside you,
you begin the dangerous, beautiful work of imagining one that could be.

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What, Then, Can We Become?

If we are not one people—if we never have been—what then?

What becomes of the dreamers when the dream dissolves?
What becomes of a country when its myths collapse, and only memory remains?

Some retreat. They cling to slogans. They wrap themselves in flags and fables. They try to rewind the story, as if nostalgia can substitute for justice. They say “this isn’t who we are” while ignoring that, for many, it always has been.

But for those who choose to stay awake—who resist the narcotic of denial—there is another path. One harder, holier, and more dangerous.

We do not become one people by pretending.
We do not become one people by suppressing pain or speeding past truth.
We become one—if we ever do—by walking into the fire together.

And the fire is truth.

The kind that scorches denial.
The kind that shames complacency.
The kind that confesses not only what was done, but what was allowed.

As James Baldwin said, “Nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
And as Lincoln warned, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
But Baldwin also reminded us: “People who imagine that history flatters them… are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin.”

We will remain pinned—beautiful, motionless, dead—unless we choose movement.

That movement is moral. It is civic. It is spiritual.

We must replace myth with memory.
Performance with confession.
Fantasy with repair.

And what does that repair look like?

It looks like schoolbooks that tell the truth.
It looks like treaties honored.
It looks like stolen wealth returned as investment.
It looks like policies rooted not in pity but in equity.
It looks like a country where belonging is not begged for, but built.

It looks like the quiet, daily labor of becoming worthy of one another.

As Gibran might say: You cannot love the land unless you weep for those it has swallowed. And you cannot call a nation your home until you have tended to its wounds as your own.

This is not sentimental work. It is sacred work.

We do not become a people by erasing what divides us.
We become a people by carrying it—together.
By saying: Yes, this was done. Yes, this was ours. And now we choose another way.

Unity that is not earned is a performance.
But unity born of reckoning—slow, costly, durable—that is a covenant.

We have never been one.
But if we mourn what was false, and labor for what is just,
then we may yet become—not a myth—

—but a people.

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Benediction: The Quiet Fire

Let the myth break.
Let the anthem quiet.
Let the silence speak what we were never allowed to say.

We are not one people.
Not yet.
Perhaps never were.

Let that truth sit with us—not as a condemnation, but as an opening.
Let it hush the rush to hope.
Let it clear the space where honesty can begin.

Because something sacred lives here, in the ash and the absence—in the breath between what we believed and what we now know.

We don’t need another story to soothe us.
We need a truth to sear us.
To remind us what happens when forgetting becomes policy,
and comfort becomes creed.

The task ahead is not to feel better about who we’ve been.
It is to become honest about who we are,
and daring enough to imagine who we might yet be.

And that work—of repair, of reckoning, of rebuilding—does not begin in parades or proclamations.
It begins in us.

It begins when a parent tells the whole truth to a child.
When a neighbor interrupts the lie at the dinner table.
When someone with power listens instead of speaks.
When we make space at the table not for charity, but for justice.

It begins in the quiet fire.

Not loud. Not grand. But steady.

The quiet fire is not just survival—it is refusal.
Not just warmth—but witness.

Because empires collapse in spectacle.
But nations are reborn in silence—in the unseen acts of those who refuse to let the story end in betrayal.

Each honest act is a beginning.
Each beginning is a form of rebellion.
We dwell in the long labor of becoming—step by stumbling step.

We are not one people.
Not yet.

But if we keep the fire lit,
if we mourn with clarity,
if we labor with courage,
if we speak the truth even when it costs us—then someday, someone will look back and say:

That was the turning.

Not with thunder. Not with fanfare.
But with candles held in shaking hands—
and voices, finally, telling the truth out loud.

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