Learning from the cherry blossoms

✒️ Today’s newsletter features an essay by a member of The Grove. The Grove is a small writing collective I created to work with Anya, Rishab and Jess, three extremely intelligent, thoughtful and learned people in their mid-twenties. These pieces are the result of our reading and writing together over four months.

One of the advantages of living in Washington D.C. is being able to witness the annual bloom of the cherry blossom trees. For just three days, light pink fireworks pierce the sky in full bloom, as the spring breeze gently sweeps petals onto the ground. The cherry blossoms had been immigrants just like us, donated by Japan in 1912. Transported from afar, yes, but planted, rooted, admired, integrated into the woven fabric of the representation of one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

The 250th anniversary of the longest-running democracy in the world arrives on July 4th. Amidst declarations from the Trump administration touting that the U.S. had finally reached net negative migration across the country, the nation’s capital is home to a spending spree of military parades, prayer events, and fireworks to commemorate a nation that had toiled through hardship and had now formed a more perfect union of unimaginable prosperity. Or so we are told.

America had been the dream for my immigrant grandfathers from India, who settled in the 1960s to pursue higher education. My mother’s father, lured by the chance to carve his own path outside of his family, found his first job as an oil & gas engineer on the streets of the emerging fossil fuel hub of Houston, TX, where the riches of black crude transformed lush wetlands and rolling prairies into snaking highways and sprawling suburbs. My father’s father began his PhD dissertation in the segregated halls of the American South and finished it after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. To my grandfathers, the 1960s in America were imbued with a dynamism only possible in lands so free with opportunities so abound. This was the land of rapid economic growth and affordable home ownership, of moon landings and multi-story department stores. Letting themselves be taken by the winds of America, they had planted roots. They brought their wives from India, had children, and hoped to see their legacies blossom in the bountifulness of our country’s soils.

Sixty years later, I know a different America. Perhaps as a function of taking America’s material offerings for granted, I’ve learned to criticize the “price of progress” that my grandparents so greatly admired. I do not see abundant hope; I see merciless conquest. My blood pumps the panic of a nation’s capital struggling to control the raging, imperialist impulses of the most powerful man in the world. My lungs circulate the grief of pristine landscapes beaten into submission by concrete and fertilizer, ever-expanding and ever-destroying, sucking in water and oxygen and oil and shitting out its tailings into the scrapyard of forgotten people. There is no room to breathe. There is just corporate slop piled onto screens pacifying us into nameless buyers and sellers of products built by hands far away, constructed with the blood of rivers and the carcasses of mountain-faces. The price of progress is our lack of mercy. Other nations, ecosystems, our morality, strangled under the knee of human supremacy. I can’t breathe. It feels impossible to reconcile the differences between my grandparents’ Americas and my own. But my family’s history tells me that America’s endless advances have also been its fatal mistakes. America had promised my father success for his brilliance. His academic success, his ambition, and his outward confidence propelled him to become a physician. As he ascended, he held more stories in his heart: those of a doting father who had left his village in the hopes that his children could grow alongside America; the lives of his patients; his own children that had rooted to him; a son that admired the books sprawled upon his desk and the curly hair on his head; and a disease consumed him the faster he rose. The winds of America took him where they promised–economic stability and social status–but they took his demons too. They took the insecurities of a man desperately performing whiteness to escape his Indian identity and the pressure he put on himself to keep expanding in the land of opportunity. They gifted him the wealth that the American dream could offer, and the means to soothe a depressed soul with bottles of liquor. They gave him the status of physician and the means to hide an addiction through his cleverness. But he could only run so far, reach so high, before his heart’s decay caught up with his ambition.

When he could no longer practice medicine, he pursued entrepreneurship with fervor. Everything was a problem to be solved, a challenge of personal will. Whether it was new medical innovations that he tried to commercialize, startups he joined ever so briefly before betraying his sobriety, or the next investment opportunity in a cryptocurrency, his yellowing eyes lit up and his hollowing cheeks filled. The books on his shelves transitioned from medical journals to self-improvement and stock market investment guides. He was manifesting the dream of America–that if he kept clawing and climbing out of the hole of self-loathing through his ambition, he could escape the demons that accompanied him.

America was not my father’s killer. But his story is the thread of America that delivers wealth with loneliness, that offers expansion without a ticket home, that tells you to run and not look back but does not warn you of the abyss ahead. A country whose constitutional promise was endless ambition produces such great men, such hearts that can never plant roots because they are always looking to escape to virgin soil.