In third grade, Ms. Ames kept us spellbound for weeks, months even, in a state of wonder, reading us versions of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” We discussed who was heroic, and what it looked like to have virtue, to be brave, to be kind. It was my first exposure to what it meant to look into my humanity, to sift through the amoral and immoral, searching for what Ms. Ames called “the truth.”
We discussed how truth was intimately connected to our identity and that a restless conscience could guide us through the whimsical world of “the gods of fate.” We were shown how when our untruths are left unattended, they lurk in the background only to fester and to reappear later — just like the Furies — with an impatient desire for revenge.
For 50 years, I’ve carried these ideas, and the thrilling conversations Ms. Ames began, into my classrooms. It became clear to me that these ideas — quests for truth, virtue and courage — are requisite parts of becoming a more realized human being, and that when these attributes are alive and well, we can live in a state of innocence.
Innocence is a choice. I recognized that all the heroes and heroines in my life live lives closely linked with innocence. Not innocence as we normally define it — a state of purity that we swiftly move past as we grow up — but an innocence achieved by choosing to live without causing harm. In this definition, innocence is aspirational and accessible to all.
Innocence is the foundational DNA of our Constitution, the spirit of our nation, waiting patiently behind the curtain of our juvenile national arrogance. Waiting for an uncompromising cultural and political commitment to truth, and a refusal to cause or be complicit in causing harm. The guarantee of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” has always been a national north star, a compass bearing for the destiny of our nation, never fully realized.
We, like Odysseus, are inspired to undertake an arduous journey where we struggle to avoid the song of the Sirens, the clever trickery of Circe and the material bliss of the Lotus Eaters, all seeking to usurp our innocence and thwart our coming “home.” The Declaration is truly a commitment to be our most robust, best selves, as people and as a nation. The spirit of our Constitution insists that genuine innocence can only exist when human rights and dignity are accessible to all of us. This is the dream currently being violently dismantled.
I believe our culture now primarily supports forging identities around what we get rather than who we are. Material acquisitions are the measure of our existential worth and the objects of our affection. I am dismayed by our national reluctance to engage in any true critical self-reflection, refusing real conversations about the distance between our actions and our presumed values. We are inundated (and insulted) by images and stories of people who are rapacious in their appetite for more. Manicured performances and ill-gotten gains are rewarded by rapt attention and money, and little scrutiny is given to whatever harm they (we) inflict. This culture of greed is not benign; it is corrosive — for the country, the earth and the individuals involved.
Thich Nhat Hanh told a story about a young girl on a small boat who was raped by a pirate. Consequently, she jumped into the ocean and drowned herself. “When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate. You naturally take the side of the girl. But we can’t do that. In my meditation, I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I would now be the pirate.”
When I ask my students, “If you grew up in the village where the pirate was raised, might you have a little pirate in you too, and if so, how do you keep your pirate behaving well?” They quickly realize that piracy is a tricky contest between our situation and our character. They understand that their innocence is bound to our national innocence in a kind of call and response.
We are pieces and parts of our nation’s ability to answer Lincoln’s call: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” My students feel the beauty of this vision despite seeing that our country has been creating pirates since our founding — justifying looting with cleverness and rewarding the “looters” with actual “booty.” The Big Beautiful Bill is the latest theft.
My students unsentimentally talk about the vast distance between who we claim to be and who we are, as defined by our actions. They are heat-seeking missiles for hypocrisy. Far from being deterred by our moral gap, though, they are committed to action, seeing the aspirational spirit of the Declaration and Constitution as a state of “higher innocence” that inspires their own paths forward. Student Morgan Karow stated, “When we remove ourselves from the power sourced from our humanity — and allow attacks on others — we attack our own collective humanity and diminish our innocence as a people.”
Ms. Ames would be delighted to learn that those conversations in the Red Brick Schoolhouse in 1960 are alive and well, because she knew that education was about who we are, not what we get. Thank you, Ms. Ames.