American Creed

KENNEDY: The American story is all about individual aspiration and achievement.

This is the land of absolutely unlimited opportunity.

We can become whoever we want to be.

We can go wherever we want to go.

It's part of our national myth.

Indeed, no society can cohere over time if it doesn't possess some myths that people believe in common.

RICE: That's what holds us together, this great American creed that it doesn't matter where you came from.

It matters where you're going.

It starts with us as Americans.

Regathering ourselves around values, experiences, stories, if you will, about what it is to be an American.

[music playing] [bicycle bell dings] STUDENT: I feel like my dad is definitely one of the strongest forces in my life that has been pushing me to educate myself and take school very seriously.

He came to America from Poland without any money in his pocket and without knowing any English.

So, when I think about it, it, like, blows my mind.

It was such a courageous thing.

RICE: David and I have been friends for a number of years on the Stanford faculty, and we found ourselves one day talking about America.

As I would travel around the world, the one thing that always attracted people to the United States of America was this idea that it didn't matter where you came from, it mattered where you were going.

You could come from humble circumstances.

You could do great things.

And David, Pulitzer-prize winning historian, found that it was this core of the essence of America that interested him, too.

KENNEDY: As you can see at a glance, Condi and I are two different people.

[laughter] We're not the same gender or the same race.

We don't worship in the same church.

We don't vote in the same political party, bu RICE: Other than that... [laughter] But what we have in common is a shared sense of the fragility of our common purpose and common enterprise as a people.

So, that's what we hope we can discuss with all of you here this morning.

I hear more and more people say, you know, we're coming apart.

Our institutions don't work.

Our government can't get anything done.

We're not civil to one another anymore.

Our political system is so polarized.

JOE: Because we do trust one another.

In times like this, we need stories that remind us of the ideals that hold us together.

We aspire to be a country where immigrants can find opportunity.

RICE: A country where access to education can change everything.

KENNEDY: A country that believes deeply in the notion of service and the full participation of every citizen.

RICE: A country in which political opposites can bridge the divide and take on problems.

KENNEDY: And where individual achievement and ambition can, in the best cases, raise up communities.

RICE: With so much diversity, we have to bond to a common sense of what we're trying to achieve.

You have to understand what the common enterprise is.

You have to understand what the common aspiration is.

And I think we've lost sight of it.

[music fades, train rumbling on tracks] [train horn blares] JOE: My grandparents on both sides, when they came over from the old country, they all wanted to improve life for their children.

But it was tough.

[indistinct voices] [man whistles] My grandpa, Grandpa Klosek, died from black lung.

He worked in the coal mines.

My mom said he would be, you know, spitting up black, as he was on his deathbed.

[car horn honking] My Grandpop Maddon also began in the coal mines, Then he established a plumbing business, and my dad and all my uncles became plumbers.

Me, growing up, I did not want to be a plumber, and my dad knew that.

My dad would come home from work.

He'd be black from working in a stoker or pulling out some ashes or whatever, literally black.

His hands would be black.

You could just see the whites of his eyes.

He'd grab the glove, and we'd go play catch.

He knew how hard it was for my grandpop.

He knew how hard it was for him and my uncles.

He did not want it to be that hard for me.

[music playing] Peanuts!

Peanuts!

MAN: It has been 107 years since the Cubs won the World Series.

WOMAN: The right manager could make all the difference.

He's got the magic, he's popular with the players, and he likes to mix it up.

MAN 2: Well, hope always springs eternal in Wrigleyville.

[cheering] JOE: It's all about building relationships.

As you get to that point where everybody feels respect and trust, now we can really get somewhere.

[music fades to crowd cheering] JOE BUCK: Here's the 0-1.

This is going to be a tough play.

Bryant!

The Cubs win the World Series!

[loud cheering] [music playing] [music fades] [distant thunder rumbles] JOE: I think you have to be pretty self-confident.

If you don't have good self-esteem, all kind of things intimidate you.

Hazleton'as been challenged in that regard, There's no question about it.

The city itself, the structure itself has lost its confidence.

You're a coal cracker.

You're from Northeastern Pennsylvania.

That's just your identity.

There's been no real economic boom around here since coal.

[music playing] Some days, I don't even recognize the place.

There's no streetlights, there's potholes everywhere, and all you hear about is all the tension in the city.

Wow.

Get out!

Get out!

Illegal immigration is destroying cities such as Hazleton.

REPORTER: Hazleton mayor Louis Barletta is now defending the Illegal Immigration Relief Act passed by the City Council.

The city ordinance would fine landlords who rent to illegals or employers who hire them.

MAN: Somebody say, "Oh, you're Mexican.

You have to leave from here."

But what about the discrimination?

Because you're white and we are brown?

MAN: This ordinance has never been about discrimination.

This ordinance has been about checking with the federal government to see if a person is lawfully present in the United States.

BARLETTA: It's standing up for American workers, for United States workers, and for taxpayers.

JOE: Everything's been magnified, and primarily the negative side was being magnified.

There's so much misinformation going on here.

You've got to quell the madness at some point.

You've got to put your foot on its neck.

[music playing, indistinct voices] [applause] The Hazleton Integration Project is trying to help bring together the cultures within our city, the Hispanic and Anglo cultures.

We want to create a situation where the kids come together, whether it be academically, maybe a boxing class, take a yoga class, debate club, whatever.

UMPIRE: Play ball!

[crowd cheers] We want to create these baseball leagues.

We want to get kids playing on the same teams, getting to know one another.

You want to make kids friends fast?

Put them on the same team with the same common goal, and I promise you, color of skin, language barriers, what you like to eat, that goes away just like that.

Make them interact with one another, because, I'll tell you what, the parents are gonna follow, man.

They've got to come pick them up.

They've got to come watch them play.

And then at some point, you've got to start talking to one another.

And "I like them.

I like this guy.

I like this lady.

I mean, they're good people."

[kids cheering] 2, 3!

Hazleton!

JOE: The moment we trust each other, at that point, we can build something.

[paradegoers cheer] [marching band playing] These people wanted to be in our hometown, and now it's their hometown, Hazleton.

You have this group that wants to come in and raise families and go to church and attend schools and create jobs.

And I really thought if we did not accept the group that was moving in, the city was gonna die.

And the thing that really baffles me that I find kind of ironic is the same group of people that are against our Hispanic brothers and sisters coming in had grandparents that came over from the old country to Hazleton at some point.

And when they came over, they were made fun of their language.

They didn't speak the language.

They dressed funny.

Their music was weird.

What about that food?

Their kids are dirty.

All that same stuff was... was... Their grandparents had to endure those same thoughts.

[music playing, gulls squawking] RICE: We have to constantly remind ourselves that we are a country of immigrants.

I hear some things that are said about immigrant you know, "They come here because they want to take advantage of the... the social welfare system."

Really?

The United States doesn't really have an extensive social welfare system.

If you wanted to do that, you'd go someplace else probably, not here.

People don't come here because they want to be on welfare.

No, they want to come here because they really do believe that they can make life better for themselves and for the next generation.

Sometimes we have sort of stereotypes of one another, and we look at somebody, and we think we know their background.

David, first person in your in your family to go to college?

KENNEDY: First person to go to college.

My grandparents were Irish immigrants.

My dad was allowed to finish high school, But that was it.

And then you had to go to work to help support the family.

So nobody had a college education till I came along.

And my grandfather was college educated.

So it's interesting, you know, family backgrounds and color can sometimes be a bit deceiving.

KENNEDY: Yeah.

So all of you are first-generation college goers, right?

Go ahead.

Tell us your story.

STUDENT: Okay.

Um... [laughs] So my mom is from rural Massachusetts, and my dad was born in San Diego.

Both were pretty poor growing up and remain so today.

And I think that one of the problems with the American Dream is that so much of it is based on luck.

And you can, like, try your best and still be struggling, but that blame is put entirely on you as an individual.

And so, you see.... KENNEDY: American national identity, from the earliest commentators on it, has been all about freedom and aspiration and clearing the ground for achievements and the fulfillment of dreams.

And we're hesitant to blame any factors beyond ourselves for the failures that we inevitably encounter.

There are instances in American history where that mindset, that psychology actually is quite palpable.

And, in fact, what happened to my father in the 1930s is a prime example.

[music playing] My father had worked during World War I in a artillery shell factory in Buffalo, New York.

This was a very well-paying job, So he'd saved a lot of money.

So, when the war was over, in the early 1920s, he headed west to make his fortune.

And eventually found his way to a start-up mining operation in Washington State at a place called Trinity.

The company that ran Trinity Camp was called the Royal Development Company, and there was a lot of promise that this place was really going to be a major copper-mining facility.

I actually have some of his letters from 1928, 1929 when he was corresponding with some of his family members.

His sisters were saying things like, "Well, Burt, once your mine comes in, you're going to buy me that little Ford Roadster, and you're going to buy me a fur coat and so on.

So the family expected this was going to be a big payoff.

[music playing, gulls squawking] [boat horn blares] My mother and father met on a Washington State ferry.

My mother was twirling a religious medal on a chain around her finger, and it slipped off and skidded across the deck, and my father picked it up and returned it to her and said, "Oh, I guess we're both Catholics."

And it went on from there.

[music playing] They got married in August of 1930.

They go away on their honeymoon, and they came back.

Here's the two-room annex where they're going to live.

That was the good news.

The bad news was the Great Depression.

The company was, at that point, going bankrupt.

And it barely kept going for another few months.

And then it gave up the ghost altogether.

[music fades] And all that little grub stake that my father had made working in that World War I artillery shell factory, just went poof, and he was dead broke.

[wind howls, a raven calls] My father felt that he had let himself down, he'd let his new bride down.

And his whole dream of the life he anticipated having was just absolutely gone.

It broke his life in two, I think, that episode.

His sisters later would tell me that as a young man, he was one of the sunniest, most energetic, upbeat people.

He was just... he was not a sunny, upbeat person when I knew him.

[music playing] Now, at the height of the Great Depression, there were 13 million people unemployed in the United States, 25% of the workforce unemployed.

And any reasonable observer might've said, "Hey, wait a minute.

"There was a systemic breakdown of some kind.

The economy broke down."

But the almost universal psychological response that men had to going unemployed was to feel guilty and ashamed and personally responsible for their situation.

The promise of this society is not always fulfilled, and among the things we need to pay attention to is the gap between the promise and the reality and why it is that some of our fellow citizens have not, cannot, do not, maybe will not ever realize what I will unapologetically call the promise of America.

[music playing] Good morning.

How are you?

Oh, I hear that.

We lost that hour of sleep.

[chuckles] Good morning.

WOMAN: Bye, baby.

[laughs] Bye.

For me, what it means to be an American is that we get to enjoy freedom.

But with freedom comes great responsibility.

It's cold.

I've been principal at Lindbergh now for 6 years, and I can't think of anyplace else I would rather be.

The kids that we get to work with are wonderful, and I want to make sure that they feel loved and that we're giving them the best education they can get.

So I'm living my American Dream.

That's... that's to be an educator.

Hey, Gregory.

How long are we gonna let this grow?

GREGORY: Uh... until it stops growing.

DEIDRE: Oh, forever, then?

Have a good day.

In the mornings, I think it's important that I'm visible, that the parents see me.

And even if it's just a wave every morning, that's, you know, just one step in building our community.

[school bell rings] [students speaking indistinctly] TEACHER: Today we are going to talk about the early Native American tribes in Oklahoma.

We're gonna make a map similar to the one that we made with our regions.

Do you guys remember when we did that?

Ok.

We're gonna make one similar to that, only it's going to be about the Native American tribes, the early ones.

DEIDRE: Oklahoma is a land of Native Americans.

I'm Creek Indian.

This is located in Creek Nation, and, uh, so it's... it's fun to get to see the Native Americans that come through the door.

While we are a melting pot, we can't forget where we've come from, and we all need to learn about each other's history.

The connection between my family history and where I'm at today is I'm a fifth-generation educator.

My dad was a math teacher.

And my grandmother was a teacher also.

[music playing] Even my great-great-grandfather, Moty Tiger was his name, he was also a teacher.

So, education, I guess, has always been in my blood.

The message was that education is the key to success and to better yourself.

[music playing, birds singing] But in the instance of my grandmother, her family also happened to have good luck.

They were able to at least maintain some land in Indian territory.

They weren't forced off of that land like a lot of Native Americans were.

And then their land happened to have oil on it, and that financed a lot of their education.

So they weren't forced to live in poverty like a lot of Native Americans were.

What I'm doing now is kind of like paying it forward.

What does it mean whenever you hear the word "American"?

Just the word "American".

What do you think that means?

Well, I think it means freedom.

TEACHER: Ok.

What does it mean to be free?

STUDENT: I think freedom means they cannot boss you around.

TEACHER: They can't boss you around.

Ok.

[indistinct students' voices, music playing] [children calling out] DEIDRE: When I look at my childhood, I was very, very fortunate.

And a lot of my kids, their families have to rely on welfare.

A lot of my kids, one or both parents are incarcerated.

I've got a lot of kids in foster care.

But we want to encourage our students and let them know that they can go on.

They can do whatever they want.

TEACHER: What does it mean to you, Nadir, whenever you hear the word "American"?

Nadir: Um, that you're free to decide who you want to become.

TEACHER: You are free to decide who you want to become.

You're absolutely right.

As long as you're willing to put in the work, You can be it.

Ok?

Happy.

Bright.

DEIDRE: We have some students now that have been to a different elementary school every two months.

STUDENT: Expense... DEIDRE: Their families go where the jobs are, or they go where rent is the cheapest.

[music playing] A lot of times, when the kids come in, they're not at the reading level they should be.

It's our job to get them there.

But that takes more than just a 9-month period.

We just play it like they're gonna be here for the long haul.

And some of the kids we see come back, and some we never see again.

Have a good one, too.

I still love you.

But I refuse to believe that these kids won't be better off in their future for what we're doing now.

Um, I... I don't want to think that... that they can't be.

[school bell rings] [indistinct children's voices echo as music plays] RICE: I can't deny that the data show that the United States is becoming less mobile.

Increasingly, if you're in that housing project, you're not gonna get out of that housing project.

And that's a tremendous danger to who we are, who we profess to be, and who we want to be.

Because when you are a country that's based on an aspirational notio it doesn't matter where you came from, it matters where you're goin it had better be true, because it's the only thing that's holding you together.

[distant train horn blares] [singing and clapping] WOMAN: O I see freedom in the air CHOIR: See freedom in the air WOMAN: up over my head CHOIR: up over my head WOMAN: I see freedom in the air RICE: There are always going to be gaps between a country's aspiration and the reality.

And so we're always fighting to overcome that gap.

We're always trying to get closer to what the ideal is.

WOMAN: Up over my head CHOIR: Up over my head WOMAN: O I see justice in the air CHOIR: I see justice in the air PASTOR: While teaching children about world religion, a teacher asked her students to bring a symbol of their faith to class.

They did that.

The first child said, "I'm Muslim, and this is my prayer rug."

The second child said, "I'm Jewish, and this is my family menorah."

The third child said, "I'm a member of the Black church, and this is a copy of my family's gospel songbook.

And I also brought a copy of the Civil Rights Act of 1964."

And so it goes... in America.

RICE: I think everyone has to come to terms at some point with your home and how it's shaped you.

CONGREGATION: Thanks be to God.

[music playing] Growing up as a little girl in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, where you couldn't even go to a restaurant, couldn't go to a movie theater, in that Birmingham, Alabama, we were still being told, "America is yours, and you can succeed here."

[music playing] And as I think back, under the pressures of Jim Crow segregation, with all of these negative signals around their kids about how America did not accept them, that's quite a trick that those parents pulled off.

And it almost always came down to if you could be educated, then you had a kind of armor against prejudice.

You had a kind of armor against barriers to opportunity.

And so, for Black American families, education became the Holy Grail.

[rooster crows] John Wesley Rice Sr., my grandfather, was a sharecropper's son in Greene County, Alabama.

His mother was a freed slave who had taught him how to read, and he decides he's gonna go to college.

So he saved up his cotton, and he went off to Stillman in Tuscaloosa, Paid for his first year of college, got through it.

And then they said, "So, how are you gonna pay for your second year?"

He said, "Well, I'm out of cotton."

And they said, "Well, you're out of luck."

He says to them, "So, how are those boys going to college?"

They said, "Well, what you have to understand is, they have what's called a scholarship.

And if you wanted to be a Presbyterian minister, then you could have a scholarship, too."

And my grandfather says, "You know, that is exactly what I had in mind."

And my family's been Presbyteria and by the way, college-educateever since.

[music playing] That access to education was gonna change everything, and not just for him, but for generations to come.

Granddaddy Rice founded churches in Mississippi and Louisiana and Alabama.

And then it was his pattern to found not just a church, but a school.

My grandfather would go door to door and say to parents, "You know, your daughter's smart, and she ought to go to college.

And so I'm gonna get her a scholarship."

For Granddaddy Rice, that was the promise of our country: that you can be and do anything you want, but you can't leave others behind.

Faith matters.

Family matters.

Community matters.

That was my family's tradition.

[indistinct voices, music fades] You've all described, in one way or another, your beginnings and where you came from.

When you go back, what does that say to you about where you've come from, what is required and where you're going?

The people that you see when you're there, your families, your siblings.

How do you see that it doesn't matter where I came from, each of you, it matters where I'm going.

How do you see that connection?

I think that an experience that made home very salient to me is a conversation I had with my grandfather.

I remember remarking that home, or Collins, Mississippi, was just a very static place, it felt like change didn't happen.

It felt like the same things that people fought about in his lifetime, in my mom's lifetime, is still being fought about today.

And then my grandfather just pointed out the fact that he was born in the Great Depression.

He did not finish high school.

His kids finished high school, and I am going to, arguably, one of the best colleges in the nation and the world.

And that his one lifetime has seen so much change.

When I think of home, I think of lots of amazing things.

I think of the smell of my mom's cooking, and I think of my brother.

Um, but I also think of a lot of struggles that happened in my home and a lot of negative experiences that built me but also broke me down.

I am incredibly humbled by my parents and how hard they work.

My mom is a janitor at Stanford.

Um, so she literally cleans toilets to pay for my tuition.

And if I make it to a really high position, a decision making position, I feel like I will always remember the stories my parents told me.

I think I what a lot of you all have spoken is the importance of remembering where you've come from.

And so the way you framed the question was sort of it doesn't matter where you've come from, it only matters where you're going.

But I think that what you all have just expressed is that it is crucial to remember who you are, where you've come from, the community that poured into you, and to always return to that.

Maybe America and being American is about bringing where we're from to where we're going and making that connection.

[distant car horn honks] JUNOT: As a nation, you don't know yourself because of what you're doing in the heart of your power.

You know who you are and what your values really are by how they play out in your farthest, farthest edges.

[music playing] You know, I grew up at the margin of our society.

I emigrated in 1974 from the Dominican Republic.

I had never even seen a map of the United States.

I had never seen any photographs.

But the best part about being a kid is that you don't know any better.

I assumed everybody, when they were 6 years old, was pulled up out of their home country and placed in another place where you had to learn English.

Well, when I think about what it should mean to be American, I think of my librarian, Mrs.

Crowell, a woman who couldn't speak a word of spanish and yet took this kid who couldn't speak a word of English and made sure that I understood my privileges in the library.

Mrs.

Crowell believed deep in her heart that one day someone would walk into her library, some little first-, second-, or third-grader, who would become a writer.

Who in the world could not love the public library?

It was fair as hell.

Every single person could take out as many books as the other person, And it didn't matter that I was poor, It didn't matter that I had an accent.

The public library as a concept, this is as American as jazz, man.

As a nation, we need institutions, public institutions, that reinforce our civic society.

And when all is said and done, if we will be remembered for anything as a nation, hopefully we will be remembered for that.

[music playing] JUNOT: My community in New Jersey was very, very interesting.

I just ran into a friend of mine who I grew up with, and he said it bes we were like some strange United Nations experiment.

I was Dominican.

My upstairs neighbor was African American.

My best friend was Cuban.

My other best friend was Egyptian.

I would stick my head out, and there would be dozens of kids.

It looked like adults had been raptured to another world, because it just felt like we ran the place.

To make friends with people across borders and across continents, I just feel a great debt to it.

Because those early childhood years structured a lot of my thinking and a lot of my art.

[music fades] But you got to remember, there was a lot of poverty and a lot of hardship.

We also had one of the largest active landfills right inside our neighborhood.

So all the dump trucks came through, you know, spouting all their fumes and leaking.

You know, these two things exist in my mind.

They're sort of like a helix of the wonder of it.

And in some ways, the great difficulties of it.

[music playing, voices shouting] The stuff that we did when we were kids, I think that those experiences have continued to reap dividends for me as a person.

You know, my ability to connect, my ability to build collectives, my ability to open my space up so that there's a lot of people to come in.

For example, 12 of us would all band together, pack, you know, some chips, some water, and would say, "Hey, let's go on a trek to Cheesequake State Park."

"Well, where's Cheesequake State Park?"

"Well, we've got to cut through the landfill.

We've got to find our way over the Morgan River, so we've got to actually cross the turnpike on foot, and then we've got to cut through the forest until we get to the swimming hole.

We'll be back hopefully by nightfall."

I mean, I'm doing this at 9 years old, Because, you know, for all of the stuff that we lacked, um, for all of the marginalization, there was a kind of collective culture, this aspiration that we can come together in a profound diversity, and we will make things happen.

[music fades] You know, a lot of scholars point out that one of the things that's occurred in the last 40 years is that we've become more alone, that we've become more atomized, more separated from sort of the... the sort of nourishment of collectives, of groups, of organizations.

The nation as a whole seems very addicted to this concept of individuality, the concept of, you know, "I've dragged myself up by my bootstraps."

And yet most of the forces that act against Americans, most of the sort of cruelties that Americans experience require collective action to correct them, to combat them.

[music playing] That claim that no nation is better at unleashing individual potential than the United States... I don't know.

I just don't buy it.

I guess I don't buy it.

[music playing, indistinct voices] This is a country, after all, that incarcerates, you know, a huge part of its population.

And I guess if incarcerating our young people for minor infractions is part of unleashing their individual potential, then I guess I got my terms wrong.

This is a country that spends so little on education for the poor, it's risible.

And I think that often the idea of patriotism in this country tends to be, um, turning away, not looking, denying, yeah?

But I think that there's no greater love of a nation than to look for the places where we're not doing our best job.

[music playing, indistinct children's voices] This is the reason why the margins are important, Because the people who are at the margins can bear witness to the reality of our nation, can bear witness to what our future needs to be.

For someone to tell me our nation is good doesn't mean anything if it's not coming from the people who are most, um, being, in some ways, rubbed out by that myth of being good.

[steam hissing] [music fades] KENNEDY: All peoples want to believe well about themselves.

Societies that get infected with very bad images of themselves, I think, are pretty sad societies.

And the problem area we've entered into now in our own time is that we've lost faith in our society in all kinds of institutions, and especially in the leadership of institution Government, the church, boy scouts, professional athletics, the media.

I mean, you name your institution, and we think less well of it today than our parents did.

This loss of belief is one of the things that has diluted the feeling, just the feeling of citizenship.

[music playing] [crossing bell dinging] [gulls squawking] TEGAN: I'll be driving somewhere, and if I see a tattered flag, it drives me crazy.

Like, I want to write a letter to Target and be like, "Your flag looks terrible.

Do something about it."

Like, I really... And that's kind of ingrained.

I got in a heated debate with some idiot wearing the flag the wrong way the other day, wearing it as a cape.

We got in an argument in a bar because he was stepping all over it, And I ripped it off of him, and I was just like, "What are you doing, man?"

He's like, "Supporting America."

And I'm like, "By stomping all over the flag?"

Like you said, it's like people bled for this.

I can picture their faces in my head.

Like, I can give you a list of names.

TEGAN: I always like to say that I could go on a road trip around America, and I'd have a place to stay in every state because of being in the military.

I love that sense of community.

No matter what, we know that we have that common bond of service.

I was 21 when I joined the Marine Corps.

[airplane passing] My grandpa was in the Army.

[music playing] My dad had been in the Army the whole time I was growing up.

My little brother joined the Marine Corps right out of high school.

And... I got... I got the bug.

[music playing, plane engine rumbling] [music fades] There's a picture that somebody took of me waiting for our plane to load to go overseas.

I have this huge, you know, smile on my face.

I'm like, "Girl, why did you take a rabbit with you to iraq?"

Deep down inside, I was probably pretty nervous, knowing that I was getting out and doing something that... the heart of what is important to my family, serving the nation during a time of war.

[music playing, birds singing] Well, I feel like people from rural areas know what hard work and dedication is.

And we're patriotic.

And, you know, it's... it's common knowledge that people that live in rural areas, for the most part, are not millionaires, unless you have a vacation home.

I think that's what allures a lot of people to join the military.

It's a great benefit to serve your country and be able to afford putting food in the mouths of your children.

That one.

This one.

Look at that.

Which one is that?

[laughs] That's actually the day I got back from basic training in 1983.

[laughing] Oh, you look so young.

And, um... Erin.

Erin.

Growing up, you know, we didn't... we didn't have a lot of money.

We always felt like the underdog, kicking and fighting.

We had to work for everything that we had.

And the military was our career path.

I mean, it's not like we're The MacArthurs or anything.

You know, bottom line, you volunteer to go out and be a bullet catcher or... or be a bullet launcher, one of the two.

Prefer launcher.

Yeah, prefer launcher, um... Obviously, the consequences are, are grave, but... or could be grave, but you... well, just do it.

[sirens] TEGAN: We all were around when 9/11 happened.

We were all united that one day.

You know, some people may've been in Texas.

Some people may've been in New York City.

Some people may've been in Wisconsin.

I was a sophomore in high school when that happened.

And it... I really feel like it tugged at the patriotic heart strings of people like myself and like my brother and my dad and my grandpa especially, who was too old to serve, but, gosh darn it, he wanted to, you know.

[music playing, sirens wailing] When the nation is under attack, you serve.

[chanting in unison] [shouting indistinctly] [all respond in unison] [music playing] It's not glamorous being support staff for an attack helicopter squadron, but I know I had a purpose.

You owed it to those family members.

You owed it to those people that we lost.

Some people are like, "We shouldn't have gotten involved in this.

We shouldn't have done this.

We shouldn't have went overseas.

Look at the cost of human life."

It's like, yes, I get, I've got it.

But remember how you felt that day.

[music fades, engine roaring] You don't join the military to be in one political party or not.

You are a Marine, and you can't pick political sides.

But, you know, I live in Madison, Wisconsin.

People love to protest.

I go out on my lunch break, and people are out there with signs and horns and bells and whistles and just a-hootin' and hollerin' and making all this racket, yelling at the governor on the Capitol, and... I think it's cool that they do that.

[drums beating, indistinct voices] I think the American ideal of citizenship is about service to others, either through military service or volunteerism or advocacy.

And it's refreshing to see people paying attention to the government, because they bring to light something that other people may have not been paying attention to.

And I think that's, that's really interesting.

[tambourine jingling, band playing] And even if I don't necessarily agree with their opinions, I still appreciate them because that freedom is the fabric of my uniform.

You put that uniform on to protect their right to do that.

That's what it means to serve the country.

[music playing] You know, it's like, ok, yep.

They're exercising their freedom of speech.

My job, you know, is done.

[music fades] -Am I right, you're a veteran?

-Yes, I am, sir.

And where were you in service?

Let's see.

I've been a reservist for almost seven years now.

I'm a platoon sergeant, and I deployed to Afghanistan from 2011 to 2012.

Would you care to just talk a little bit about how these two communities that you've been part of, the military and Stanford, how do they compare with each other?

Oh, man, um... [laughs] There's a lot of differences.

-I expect that's right.

-First off, people in the military show up on time to things.

[laughter] That's the first one.

But one weekend a month, I go back to my reserve unit.

It's the same people I deployed with, the same people I went to war with.

And here, I'm like "the veteran" in class, you know, and if you ask me military questions, I'm like the subject-matter expert on everything military apparently.

But when I go back to my unit that one weekend a month, um, I'm just Sergeant Legoski, the platoon sergeant.

We all have the same mission, the same job.

We rely on each other very equally.

I can't do my job without these soldiers.

I can't do my job without my command.

And I can't do my job without my peers, my fellow platoon sergeants.

And I think taking that back here is that we could rely on everyone here in this room.

And there isn't just us here.

There's also people outside this room that we could rely on, others who have the same ideals.

We are all Americans.

Yeah, we all have our different identities, but together, I think we kind of want to raise the nation up.

And, you know, we're not doing this alone.

[music playing] [music playing, gulls squawking] WOMAN: All right, candidates.

If you all please raise your right hand... And repeat after me.

I hereby declare on oath... ALL: I hereby declare on oath... WOMAN: That I will support and defend... ALL: that I will support and defend... WOMAN: the constitution and laws... ALL: the constitution and laws... WOMAN: of the United States of America... ALL: Of the United States of America... WOMAN: against all enemies... ERIC: Naturalization ceremonies, when immigrants become citizens of the United States.

They are among the most moving things you could possibly attend.

[applause] When you get to see a parade of people who have chosen to make this country their own... from all of these other parts of the world, and you watch them have that moment of claiming... it gives you new eyes to see what it is that we take for granted around us.

[applause and laughter] Today this nation has welcomed 20 new citizens into the fold of American life.

And as a second-generation American, all my life I have wondered what would it be like to be like those of you who emigrated to this country, to make that choice and to make that leap?

But also, what would it be like for all of us to have an opportunity together to celebrate the meaning and the content of our citizenship?

[music playing] My parents are immigrants.

They moved all across a war-torn China during the Sino-Japanese War and Second World War, and from Taiwan in the '50s came to the United States.

They both pursued higher education here, and so I grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York, in the Hudson Valley.

So it was this real American, uh, Dream.

It's especially heightened when you are second-generation, and you really can visualize what it would've been like had you been born in the other place.

[singing indistinctly] Where would I be had my parents not made it to the United States?

We sit here talking just a couple of weeks after the anniversary of the massacre on Tiananmen Square.

I think about what it would've been like to have been a high-schooler in Beijing and what choice I would've made.

[chanting indistinctly] I had the good fortune to be born American.

I can express my political opinions, and I'm not gonna get just scooped up by cops in the middle of the night.

[protesters chanting] And that has really fueled my sense of purpose.

The entirety of my life after college has been in public work, either working in government or working to promote political engagement.

I want for us, as citizens, to be as prepared and powerful and engaged and literate and ready to participate and contribute as we possibly can.

[music playing, indistinct voices inside] [applause] What we're talking about here in the civic context is how we treat one another, how we live in community, how we see ourselves as woven into a fabric of relationship and obligation.

And that notion is what our broken, fissured, gragmented body politic today needs deeply.

Citizen University is a nonprofit that works to foster a stronger culture of citizenship in the United States.

We convene leaders from the left and the right to come together and learn together and solve problems together.

WOMAN: We need to make sure that the people that we put in office represent us and our issues.

And if they don't, how can we... how can we bring that to light?

ERIC: We have people working on immigration reform who've never met people from the veterans world, who've never met people who are thinking about civic education in a classroom.

And so what Citizen University does is simply to stitch this ecosystem together.

ERIC: Should we just set up around here?

ERIC: But there's another set of things that Citizen University does that are much more about the culture.

-Oh.

Me?

-So, it's fun.

Yeah, all of us.

We stand there, and we do an oath together.

It's taking an oath.

Hello.

How are you?

I'm Eric Liu.

Because we have a great diversity in American life, you have to ask yourself, what is it that holds us together?

And what holds us together is a creed, and that creed, to me, is not just a bunch of legalistic principles.

That creed operates at the gut and the heart at least as much as at the level of the head, and it is truly a civic religion.

And so one of the things that I feel like it's really important for us to do as Americans is just to renew that creed through rituals, simple rituals.

So, this is a process we have called Sworn Again America, and the idea is, if you've ever been to a ceremony where immigrants become citizens and they've got to swear an oath, we thought, well, what if we all had a chance to actually pause for a minute and just swear this oath together?

And so I'm just gonna ask you to raise your right hand.

I pledge to be an active American... ALL: I pledge to be an active American... ERIC: to show up for others... ALL: to show up for others... ERIC: to govern myself... ALL: to govern myself... ERIC: to help govern my community.

ALL: to help govern my community.

ERIC: I pledge to serve and to push my country... ALL: I pledge to serve and push my country... ERIC: when right to be kept right... ALL: when right to be kept right... ERIC: when wrong to be set right.

ALL: when wrong to be set right.

ERIC: Wherever my ancestors and I were born... BOY: Wherever my ancestors and I were born... ERIC: I claim America.

ALL: I claim America.

ERIC: Congratulations, folks.

You are now sworn again.

-Amen!

-Thank you very much.

-Amen!

-Enjoy your visit.

[cheering and applause] ERIC: Yeah!

[happy laughter] How'd that feel for you all to do that?

-It felt wonderful!

-Did it?

[joyous laughter] -That really touched me.

-Doesn't it?

ERIC: It's not just the oath.

It's more about renewing our sense that we have a civic inheritance here and a set of values that are worth nurturing.

That's the spark of Americanness that I hope does not get subdued even in this age of cynicism about what's possible in politics.

WOMAN: Eric will explain it to you.

Everybody, get in.

ERIC: Because when you stop showing up, you stop participating, you cede the field to the few who would like perfectly to command the field, and they usually don't have your interests in mind.

[birds calling] [music fades] Part of what makes the United States exciting is that, uh, it is a place in which there's always a little bit of an edge.

You are going to encounter people who are unlike yourself ethnically, religiously, economically.

This country is too fluid, too mobile not to have that happen.

-Consider, just that on -We're gonna have crazy examples coming up later.... RICE: Now, I do think you are getting political segregation.

-You don't wanna miss this.

RICE: The fact that through the internet and through cable news, you can essentially never encounter anyone who thinks differently is a huge problem in a democracy [anchors' voices overlapping] RICE: I say to my students all the time, if you're constantly in the company of people who say amen to everything you say, find other company.

[keyboard clacking, music playing] When I say I became an accidental activist, it really has a lot of truth to it.

We didn't even know what that meant when we said "tea parties."

None of us had ever organized protests before.

We wrote a one-sentence petition, and we shared that with under 100 of our friends and family.

150 people showed up, and I was just astounded.

We had 100,000 people sign that within the first week, and then to get to half a million was unheard of.

MoveOn became strongly identified with the progressive movement.

We ended up with over 20,000 people at that event.

Now you had over a million people come out nationally.

Is that enough?

Do you just walk away?

You feel a responsibility to follow through.

[music playing] Years ago, my husband and I started a software company best known for flying toasters, which was a screen saver.

And we sold the company for a lot of money.

And that's what started us out.

So I do feel like I have been blessed with more of the American Dream than I ever hoped for.

[toaster dings, fireworks pop] I'm a successful entrepreneur, for Pete's sake.

How did that happen?

Ok, to be clear, we don't need them in the meeting per se, -No.

-But to understand their interests and try to energize their constituencies or whatever, that would be awesome.

I think that would help a lot.

JOAN: I think fundamentally, all progressives are very concerned about having a fair playing field.

Here, I've had my life get more exciting than I ever imagined, and I want that opportunity for everyone.

And I would give you odds that just about every American feels the same way.

They want everyone to have that opportunity.

[ship horn blares] [music playing] MARK: I think the American Dream is an ideal that people carry in their heads, that they can come to this country and build whatever they desire.

I remember my grandmother telling me a story about arriving here as somebody handed her an orange.

She'd never seen an orange in her life.

For a young Jewish girl who had seen family members starve to death in Ukraine was quite a transformation to step on the shores in the United States.

This land of religious freedom and opportunity, freedom to reinvent yourself.

That part of being American is really woven through my family fabric.

And this is Blossom over here.

She's one of the favorite rides around the ranch.

Huh, babe?

[horse blows air] To me, the conservative is somebody who's rooted in the values of history.

They look back at history for what's worked and what's always worked.

And the root of the American Dream is this idea of individual liberty, or what I would call self-governance, that it's up to us how to live our lives and the niche that we carve for ourselves in this country.

[music playing, birds singing] I met Mark Meckler through a friend of a friend.

I remember the last line of the email, and the last line said, "God help the politicians if MoveOn and the Tea Party ever agree on anything.

[music playing, heavy footfalls] [toaster's wings beat] Joan and I spent a lot of time on the phone and by email before we ever met.

And she introduced me to the idea of Living Room Conversations, which was this organization she was starting to foster the kinds of conversations we were having, conversations between people of different political perspectives.

Two friends with a different view each invite two friends for conversation on whatever issue they've chosen in your living rooms.

They're just really asking people to listen to each other and see if there's any common ground.

I was talking to a friend of mine from Texas, and she's saying, "I don't know.

I'd be really scared about that.

I don't even know what liberals eat.

So what do you prepare for liberals?

[music playing, toaster's wings beating] We were getting ready to go to Joan Blades' house.

It's about a two-and-a-half hour drive from my house, but it's a completely different world.

The people who were with me had never been engaged in something like this, and they were pretty nervous.

JOAN: I live in Berkeley, so I'm living in a progressive bubble.

I recognize that.

What if the conversation didn't go well?

You better believe I was dusting for days beforehand for that because I was anxious.

[music playing, birds singing] MARK: The first hour is spent just getting to know each other.

What are you about?

Why does this stuff even matter to you?

And as you start to have those conversations, the walls tumble pretty quickly.

JOAN: We wanted our first conversation to be one where we found some common ground.

And we did.

[laughs] You know?

[music playing] One of the things that we kept coming back to was the banking sector.

This idea that these big investment banks, we were allowed to make investments that were very risky.

But if they failed, the rest of us were going to pay in the form of insurance.

The banks shouldn't be able to gamble with our money and get reimbursed when they lose and keep it when they win.

That's crazy.

There was so much common ground, we went over time.

[laughs] And we really were just starting.

I hadn't known that we are in for total agreement about all sorts of criminal justice issues, and that the prison industrial complex is way too powerful.

MARK: You have this weird confluence of business and criminal justice and politics, and it never made sense to me.

And then I met Joan, and she was saying kind of the same thing.

You know, language really matters, and Joan gets this.

JOAN: For example, for a conversation between right and left or about climate change, it should just be about conserving energy because climate change is seen as a progressive issue.

And the same is true on the other side.

If I say "states rights," there's baggage that comes with that.

But if I say, "Look, I believe in community governance," I'm using different language that allows us to come together and dialogue.

JOAN: You don't expect in a first conversation to solve all the problems of the world.

And there's some things that we are just so far apart on that it's, there's some discomfort there.

But I recognize him as a friend.

You could say, "Joan Blades, the founder of MoveOn.org, an organization that I don't really like, politically speaking."

But when you put the human to the organization, it changes everything.

And I don't know, but I just have to go on faith.

[music playing] Faith that if I am open and listening, some solutions will emerge, and that it's going to take some patience because it's taken us a while to get as dysfunctional as we are in the political system.

[music playing] MARK: We're having a conversation, really, about our ability as a nation to converse.

What is our national identity?

What do we believe it means to be an American?

You don't hear this conversation very much in America anymore.

So that's a way of encapsulating the subject that I think concerns both Condi and me, is how can we nurture a sense in this country of having a common home and not just a place where we make our way individually into whatever futures we have?

STUDENT: I think, yeah, personally, for me.

So my dad immigrated from Vietnam, and my mom immigrated from Cambodia, and they both meant to escape war-torn countries.

You know, they never taught us to speak their languages even though that was kind of a cultural divide between us because, you know, their English still isn't perfect, um.

But the reason they did that was because they wanted us to be American.

They told us ever since we were young that, "You are American.

You are going to live this American Dream because we never had the chance to do that.

And you speak neither Vietnamese nor Cambodian?

I started learning on my own, but my parents never wanted me to learn because they didn't want me to confuse it with English.

It's an old immigrant story, and it reminds us, you know, that the immigration is a story of aspiration and achievement and the future, but also, things get lost.

RICE: Do you still have any family in Southeast Asia?

SAVANNAH: Actually, my parents were the only ones out of their families who left.

RICE: Who left, yeah.

SAVANNAH: So, it's still very much hard because, you know, my parents are still sending money home to them because they still live in very impoverished situations.

Um, and it's just it's very hard going back because you see, like, wow, I'm so lucky.

Like, why did I get the opportunity to leave, whereas they're still there?

[car horns honking, birds singing] [train crossing bell clangs] LEILA: People come to this country to make their dreams a reality.

Equal opportunity.

I think that that's one of the cornerstones of our identity as a nation.

[music playing] It's one of the reasons that this country is so predisposed to entrepreneurship.

We have this belief that your destiny isn't handed to you and it's not guaranteed.

You have to fight for it and work for it.

And those who fight hardest will, will succeed.

My parents were educated, but they had almost nothing when they came from India.

I went to public schools in Southern California.

And then I got into Harvard, and I applied for every scholarship I could, and worked three jobs to be able to afford the tuition.

I got lucky enough to be born in this country, and that's where the vast majority of my success and happiness in life has come from.

And the idea that I could just as easily have been born in a slum in India made the mission all that more critical to me.

"SAMA" means equal in Sanskrit.

We train low-income people around the world to do work through the internet.

It's tasks like tagging images, data entry work, transcribing records.

These big tech companies pay us to do the work.

Workers receive a paycheck, and some have received some operating income to cover our costs.

We've paid out over $1.3 million to some of the poorest people.

People the world had written off, people like Shaleen.

I gave a really impassioned talk.

And a guy in the audience came up to me afterwards and he said, "What you describe doing in a refugee camp in Kenya, I think it would work in rural Arkansas."

[music playing] It's very alarming to confront the reality of places like Dumas.

I think the statistic is that over 65% of the town's residents are Black, and fewer than.5% of the businesses are owned by African-American people.

And those numbers, I would suspect, are quite similar across other parts of the Delta.

It's really part of the history of this cotton growing community.

I mean, most of the Black population there are the descendants of slaves, and more recently, sharecroppers.

And interestingly, not just the Black population, but some of the more economically marginalized white population in Dumas, also, you know, participated in sharecropping and, and, you know, they were part of the cotton picking industry.

There was no chance that you would really be able to provide for a family.

MAN: My grandfather, he worked these fields around here.

[music fades, birds singing] I remember as a little boy we were living in the house, the sharecropper house, when he passed away.

And, you know, what's interesting is that he spent this much time on this land, and when he passed away, he left nothing.

[engine rumbles] I had uncles that worked the fields.

My mom worked fields.

But many people started losing jobs because of mechanized labor.

People were suffering because they didn't have proper access to education.

They didn't have proper access to jobs, which is directly related to proper access to education, because industries aren't going to move in if the folks are skilled.

Um, and people, you know, were kind of confined to their homes and with the loss of hope.

[music playing] My dad, he ended up moving to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, working on campus there as a police officer.

So after high school, I went to the University of Arkansas.

After that, I went to get a degree in web design.

But my mom got sick with cancer.

She passed away shortly after I moved back to Dumas to be with her.

I think about the Delta.

I think about the rich tradition of struggling people.

There's culture that comes out of struggle.

I mean, I watched my grandmothe you know people buy quilt I watched her make everything that we slept under.

I watched her make her own clothes, and my, my, my mom's clothes.

Even as my mom was an adult, my grandmother made stuff for her to wear.

You have a lot of people that struggle, but out of struggle comes ingenuity.

The Delta's full of engineers that just haven't been paid like it.

[laughs] We need to empower folks with skills that make them in-demand.

[music playing] LEILA: Boot camp-style training.

It's a pretty efficient way to get people earning money more quickly.

And in the first year, we were able to hit, on average, $2,000 in increased earnings per person.

But I think our biggest struggle in Dumas has been the lack of digital literacy.

There is very little internet access.

The internet providers won't go and set up internet in your house, even if you can afford it, which is rare.

People have to walk around to certain places in town where they get cell phone coverage, and you can imagine the effect that has on their ability to seek work.

Living in San Francisco, we talk a lot about equal opportunity, and there's this tremendous sense of optimism about the future and how the cost of all of these technologies is going down so dramatically that everyone must be benefiting from that.

And then you go to a place like Dumas, which is really beyond the reach of a lot of that technological development and a lot of those advances.

And you see that opportunity is not equally distributed in any way [laughs] uh, for many people across this country.

And for me, that energizes me to keep fighting because I feel like that's a, that's just a missed opportunity.

It means that more people here need to see the reality for people on that end and what that looks like, and to, to build empathy.

WOMAN: When we first got here, my mom would wake up her girls 5:00 in the morning.

She'd have all of, all of us out there in the hot, phew, it was hot, out there chopping cotton.

And when we first moved here, we had a old house and, you know, we didn't have a toilet.

We had a outhouse in Arkansas.

TERRENCE: What year did y'all move down here?

EARNESTINE: We moved down here in 1992.

WOMAN: Equal opportunity in America, I think that's a, that's a lie.

Do we really know truly what it means to be American when we study history in school and how many lies we be fed?

The Constitution was written by, you know, some slave owners.

But I think even under the circumstances that the Constitution was written, it was written, you know, for the future of America to where everybody would be equal, everybody would, you know, have certain rights.

But, you know, you look at, you look at it now, I feel like it's just not going to, you know, change, um, for the better.

Not even with just race, but just with, uh, with poverty.

What's supposed to make this country great, those are the things that are, you know, that over the years just been torn down.

LEILA: What is tough to see in Dumas is that there's a resignation, because things have been this way for so many generations, since the days of slavery.

And to expect things to change in a generation, I think, is, um, you know, it's a high expectation.

And I think a lot of our participants in that area have just had their hopes dashed repeatedly.

So, you know, part of what we're trying to do there is, is show them that economic opportunity is an avenue to see some of these changes that they didn't see through the Civil Rights Movement and that, you know, real equal opportunity is only going to happen for the next generation if you earn more money and you have more voice as a result of that.

We think of the market as a tool.

Um, it's an advocacy tool for us, you know, and it's, it's a way to, um, spread benefits that legal changes alone can't provide.

[music playing] TERRENCE: The thing that should unite Americans is our fight not to just make things right for ourselves, but to create a path, an easier path for the people that are coming behind us.

RICE: There's something in some people that makes them want to overcome, no matter what circumstances they find themselves in.

My grandfather was like that, and my family was launched.

To be American is to accept the call of aspiration.

To be American is to break with the idea that you are a prisoner of your circumstances, and I think to be American is also to accept that it's not just about you.

You really do need to care about the collective enterprise, too.

And I think the more we lose sight of that in an era of racial and ethnic fragmentation and political polarization and income inequalities, the more things that push us away from that sense of "we're all in this together," that we have a responsibility and a duty to build and sustain healthy communities, not just healthy individual lives, the more trouble we have going forward.

[indistinct voices] DEIDRE: I believe, as a nation, we are not living up to our ideals.

We need to be concerned with every kid in the nation, not just our own.

[kids laughing and clapping] JOE: The biggest hope for our countr that we don't forget where we came from, but also, at the same time, I'm looking forward to being absorbed into the new traditions or the new rituals or the new whatevers that are brought in by the different cultures.

TEGAN: The Marines haven't gotten anywhere doing things by themselves.

And I think it would really behoove the American public to know your neighbors and to build that community.

JUNOT: America is something we aspire to.

America is a dream.

We tend to practice a lot of classism, a lot of racism, and yet the dream of an America is still alive, a dream where we can be on each other's sides.

JOAN: We've become so focused on what separates us that we forget all that we have in common.

MARK: What does it mean to be an American?

Everybody needs to ask themselves that question, and I think it's a question where the answer evolves your whole life.

LEILA: The identity we have as Americans and the ideal of equal opportunity is so powerful and such a beacon for the rest of the world.

So I remain optimistic and positive, but it's an identity that we have to fight for.

ERIC: America has nothing to hold itself together but a few ideas, a creed.

Another way to put that is all we have to hold us together is a story, and I think one thing we have learned, whether from the right or the left, is don't expect some archangel to come down and descend and give us that story.

MADDY: If I could ask every person in America, I think it would be to have everyone have a conversation like this, where people genuinely put their identities and their concerns about the nation on the table.

Because I don't think any other time I've felt more American and so frustrated with what it means to be American, but also so proud.

[music playing]