Your World Within Podcast by Eddie Pinero - What Does It Mean To Be American?

Episode Date: June 4, 2020

What does it mean to be American?  In this episode I delve into some of the current issues at hand and examine whether we are, in fact, asking the right questions.

Welcome to Your World Within Daily. I'm Eddie Panero. In this episode, we're going to look at some of the issues that have been going on over the past week or so and examine whether we are individually asking the right questions. All right, I hope everyone is having a nice Thursday, as good as it could possibly be, right? And things are going well. I wanted to touch today on a subject that, well, let's face it, it's not the most ideal, right? So one of the things that I'm most proud of, and the reason I do this every morning is because I want to help people change the way they think about the world, right? My goal is to give everyone a tidbit, something small, something simple, every day to inject into their lives and hopefully make it better, right, by changing the way that they look at themselves.

in the world around them. And so as, you know, all this stuff has been going on over the past few days, right, my instinct has been, well, you know, what are you gathering from this? What can you take? What can you say that will help people? Maybe change their perspective or maybe give them something to analyze and look at. And my thought was, Ed, your mindset, your motivation, stay in your lane, right? People don't click play on your stuff for political takes, never have, probably never will.

And so I've kind of disregarded it, right, for as much as I possibly can. But it's almost to the point where it feels silly to get up every morning and act like it's not happening. Right. So I want to give my take and what it means and how I think we can make the situation better by adjusting our thoughts, which ultimately become our actions, right? And so this will be the first time that I'm going to say something that might be controversial, right?

Loved, hated, but never ignored. That's just the way it is. And my one ask of you, as you're listening to this, is to try and take something from it, right? Even if you're listening to me and you're thinking, this guy missed the point. I disagree with what he's saying, but 100%.

Well, what can you pull from it? Maybe it's realizing that there's something, something you believe, contrary to me, that you realize energizes you or that you should act on, or whatever the case is. Right. But I'm going to kind of paint this picture for you. So something that I've learned over the years that I find to be helpful and applicable now, maybe more than ever. I was in college, and I had a professor that was talking about, you know, Catholicism as a buffet in terms of, you know, there's not a one-size-fits-all. You know, you as an individual, you take time to understand your values, what matters to you,

what you believe in, and you take the components of Catholicism or the Catholic Church that mean the most to you, and you use that to build around your faith. Nothing is one-size-fits-all. And I've sort of taken that with me in a lot of different avenues of life. Looking at the world not as a wedding dinner where you have a menu and you have two options to choose from or three. But I don't look at life that way. I look at it as a breakfast buffet where you reflect on what matters to you, what means the most. and you pick and choose.

And I think there's a lot of pressure now, a lot of incentive to bucket yourself into category one or two, to make life binary. Are you right, left, black, white, conservative, liberal, right? Do you believe in this or that? Because, God forbid, there's overlap. And what I'm going to argue is that goes again. everything that it is to be human, that this country stands for, everything that promotes a prosperous,

healthy life. We're not robots. We're not meant to think binary. And when you follow suits and symbols because you think they encapsulate your entire existence, it's wrong, and it leads you to a place that you probably don't want to be. You forget your greatest power, your individuality, right? Your ability to look at a situation, diagnose it, and make the decision that's best for you. There is no right or left or right or wrong. There's a lot of overlap. And so I'm going to ask a question.

I'll ask a few. And see what you think. is it possible and accurate that a police officer kneeling on the neck of an unarmed African-American man until he suffocates is disgusting, reprehensible, repulsive? Yes. That it's indicative of elements of a broken system. perhaps highlighting that there are things that at the very least

need to be reflected upon yes that everyone involved should be charged and hit with the law to its fullest extent yes is it also possible to say that rioting

and burning down cities does not do what people think it does. That pulling Korean shop owners out of their stores and beating them in the streets does value to no one. That burning down stores and establishments of immigrants who have risked everything

and given all of their life savings to put themselves in that situation, to see that go up in smoke, that that's wrong, that it doesn't do anything productive? I think yes. If you can walk and chew gum at the same time, you can acknowledge

a disgusting action by a police officer is bad and so is burning down a neighborhood, looting, stealing, taking people's livelihood. it. Here's another question. Is it possible to say a country has a long way to go? That just alone on the surface, that there's a group of the population that feels so alone and helpless and disenfranchised that they make that clear constantly. Shouldn't that be troubling as a member of a society, as a citizen of a country? that cares for our neighbors?

Yes. That we do have a long way to go. That literacy rates in inner cities are disgusting and not what they need to be. That opportunity is not the same everywhere? Yes. While also acknowledging that this is the freest and greatest country to ever exist. acknowledging that people have come from all over the world to be a part of what we are,

what we have here, that immigrants by the hundreds of thousands have come here, some risks their lives, not to be bucketed into some category or political group, no, there's something more. And I think what we're not doing is asking ourselves what that is. What are we as Americans? And I don't mean that metaphorically or, you know, cliche. Like what is an American? What does it mean? What are our values?

I understand we're different. I understand all never know what it's like to come up in low-income housing in downtown Baltimore, I get that. I'll never know. But what do we share? Because before we can get somewhere, before we can get where we're going, we have to know why we're going there. What is my grandfather on my mom's side, Irish immigrant, came from nothing, moved to Boston, lived in a housing project. I've heard this story 20 times. His greatest Christmas as a kid was getting an orange under the Christmas tree. Have in common with my father's side, who immigrated from Puerto Rico, came to the mainland,

had to learn the language, build lives for themselves. Because I can sit here all day and I can tell you how different they are and how one could never understand the other. But what does it mean to be American? What do we share? And I just, I don't see that. I don't see that when I open Twitter, and I don't see that on the news. I see everything but what we have in common.

If we don't have a common value system, if we don't believe some of the same things, why are we here? Why did our forefathers fight off a monarch? Why did so many people lose the same things? their lives to preserve a union and abolish slavery? Why did we go through civil rights? Why did we do all of these things? Because there are elements of our history that are sickening. They're sad. They're a black eye. But at the very core, if we don't believe there's an American ideal and we're

moving towards that ideal, that we're taking the wrongs and we're writing them little by little, little. If we don't believe that every single person deserves, as the Declaration says, life, liberty, and a pursuit of happiness, that we are born with that. It presupposes government. Then we don't have anything. And that's what all of this, it just, it makes me sad. It tugs at my heartstrings because I'm not naive to the problems. And I don't think I have the answers. I don't think me sitting here talking into a camera is going to solve the problem. But I do think we're not asking the right questions.

I do think we're not looking at what we have and what we share in the beauty of what we've built here, this 250-year experiment that allows us to be individuals, speak our minds, that allows us to criticize the president of the United States and not be dragged away and tortured. Like, by the way, so many other countries still do today. You know, it's not a now thing.

It's a forever thing. We'll forever be growing. We'll forever be moving towards that ideal. There are things we do today that 100 years from now will look back and be repulsed that we did. And 100 years from then and 100 years from then. But we have to believe that we belong to something inherently good. and that together we are moving towards improvement and adjustments,

because that's what we do. We evolve and we overcome. And, you know, I'll step off my soapbox. This has been a long episode, but if you can take anything from this, even, listen, again, even if you disagree with every word out of my mouth on this episode, please ask the question. What does it mean to be American? What do you have in common with the person you've deemed ideologically different from you?

With the person with a different skin color, different background, what do you share? What are we all moving towards together? Because if you can't ask that, this foundation is going to crumble. We have something beautiful. We're going to continue to weed out the problem. to evolve together, but let's not forget that. All right, I'll leave that there. I'll catch you guys tomorrow.