Making America great entails cooperation, not hate
By Samantha Harvey
In my parents’ town of Port Washington, you can watch Lake Michigan for hours. It’s hard not to wonder about all the people throughout time who have gathered on the shore of this lake so big you can’t see the other side, this lake that laps up on state park beaches and urban walkways, this lake that cradles rugged dunes.
Throughout my childhood in southeastern Wisconsin, Lake Michigan was a humbling presence, a reminder of the wild that connects and supports us all.
But lately I wonder about this connection. A glass-walled building on the shore has become something of an emblem to me. Despite its coveted lakeside views, each time I walk by it seems like more and more of its apartments sport flat screen TVs, and more and more individuals sit alone in front of them. And as we approach Jan. 20, our official shift to a more suspicious, insular and brutish administration, I can’t shake this image: a group of individuals stationary and separate, willfully isolated, floating above unsolid ground.
Some of my earliest memories are of going exploring with my dad in the Maywood Environmental Park in Sheboygan, running through the wildflower prairie as the sun set and crickets began their nightly chirps. I spent summers with my dad’s parents in Governor Dodge State Park, and weekends with my mom’s in Sherman Park on the west side of Milwaukee.
Family reunions met in towering forests “Up North.” On school holidays we’d drive to Madison to marvel at all the political speech, the foods from different countries, the musicians and artists who flanked the Capitol Square. Songs of red-winged blackbirds, deer tiptoeing through trees, the lapping music of Lake Michigan all merge with the memory of these people I grew up with — farmers, immigrants, business people, caretakers, teachers — the diversity of neighbors who turned the arbitrary borders of a state into a home I loved.
This is not to whitewash history. The legacy of anti-Indigenous violence was there throughout the idylls of my childhood. Milwaukee then was — and remains — one of the most segregated cities in the country. Even so, until the finality of the last election, there was a sense that we were moving, if incrementally, in the right direction.
Call it “Wistalgia,” a stand-in for the “great” America that was no stranger to dark chapters, but nevertheless climbed toward kinship. This is not the “greatness” that’s become a bullhorn for climate denial, misogyny, racism and anti-trans hate. It’s true greatness: a commitment to reject the comforts of smallness, to share stewardship of the lands that sustain us, to understand that liberation is not a finite commodity, that freedom for my neighbor does not translate to freedom taken from me.
Wisconsin is not the culprit here, but the prototype. In states across the country, as we poison our land and water, as we fearfully ignore or laugh derisively at climate change, we must realize the attention and care we give the land around us folds into the attention and care we give to other people. It’s the best kind of positive feedback loop, one we still have a small window of time to reawaken.
In these liminal weeks approaching inauguration I can’t help but recall a story I heard on my first day of eighth grade in a Wisconsin school. It was my English teacher who told it. In Hell, he said, there was a long banquet table where starving people sat helpless, with spoons too long to reach their mouths. In Heaven the spoons were just as long, but the people at the table fed each other.
In the coming years, many of us may realize we made a terrible mistake. We may look out at the choking environment and realize too late that we’ve signed away our kin to pad the pockets of our oppressors. We may realize the “other” we wanted removed was actually our neighbor, our friend, our family, even ourselves. We may realize the “greatness” we voted for is not the same as the one they had in mind.
I hope we will not realize too late. I hope we will turn our gazes back to the lakes, the lands, the urban green spaces, and once again practice feeding each other. I hope we will reawaken to our many differences as the beauty and freedom we’ve been waiting for. We can. We must.
Samantha Harvey is a writer, meeting facilitator and climate justice activist.
This article was published in collaboration with the Island Press Short-Form Program, which is supported by The Kresge Foundation and The JPB Foundation. It was originally published December 7, 2024, on The Cap Times.
