Now the real work begins to heal our wounded nation
As I watched the events unfold this week at the Capitol, like you, I was in disbelief. We all had to ask ourselves, is this really happening in America?
A group of agitators, fueled by election misinformation, stormed the Capitol and disrupted the constitutional duties of Congress to certify the results of the November election. Seeing these unprecedented events, I thought about my parents — my Bolivian father and Colombian mother — and wondered how this must look through the eyes of immigrants who fled political violence in their own country.
Before moving to the United States, my dad and his parents were witnesses to successful and failed coup attempts, military juntas, regular social instability and political violence. Armed militias and mass violence were all too common in Bolivia when he was a young man.
Colombia’s multidecade civil war began in 1964 when my mother was a teenager there. Before that, during the ’50s, Colombians suffered through La Violencia, another internal war between conservative and liberal political parties featuring a 1953 coup d’état at the hands of military strongman Gustavo Rojas Pinilla.
Seeking a better life, my parents left Colombia and Bolivia to come to a country where people work to build up the institutions that protect freedom and democracy rather than assail them. The America my parents pursued — and all the great values it preserved — was not a mirage. But our treasured institutions can be taken for granted, and we are at an inflection point. We can double down on divisiveness or we can seek common ground and work together to solve the problems our nation faces. I think we would all rather see our country rally to address the human catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic that is claiming lives by the minute.
I’m crestfallen because we are going to have to explain to our children why all of this is hap
pening. We are going to have to look our sons and daughters in the eyes and reassure them that the American values we hold
dear continue to be vitally important. We are going to have to remind them that the actions of a few don’t define who we are as a nation.
After the turmoil that we saw this week, it may be difficult for us to feel that we are united. But we all have a part to play — we can work to heal our nation’s wounds or stand by as agitators deepen these divides. In the wake of this tragedy, we can take this opportunity to come together and condemn these actions, or we can let this be the preface to a darker chapter in our country’s history.
One lesson I’ve learned from the stories of my parents is that we risk losing everything that makes our nation great when we take its founding principles for granted.
Today is a new day and God will grant us another opportunity to live up to the ideals Americans claim to hold dear. Let us each rededicate ourselves to expressing the civility and compassion that define our country’s character, to recognizing the bedrock principles and common humanity we share, and to committing to deal in respect rather than animosity.