Your Dada's American Dream

It is time I told you boys the story of how we came to America.

Your Dada was the first of our Indian family to arrive here, by way of Ottawa and Chicago. But similar to the histories of many immigrants, his story doesn't begin in North America, it begins on the shores of a distant land, halfway across the world.

Bombay is a city on the sea. I have never been there, but I have heard of its vista many times. Your Dada loved the sea, although I'm not sure whether he's always loved the water or if he began to love it because he moved to Bombay. Which is not where our family is from, by the way - we are not Mumbaikars, ancestrally - but it is where the tale of our family coming to America begins.

Your Dada was at university for engineering there. He was in a hallway, probably on his way to some class, and a forgotten piece of paper was strewn across the floor ahead of him. This paper, at least from the way he told me the story, made quite an impression on him. As it turns out, the paper was a list, of colleges and universities in the United States and Canada that offered scholarships for foreign students.

And the idea to leave India in search of a better life, was probably a seed in his head before this moment. But this forgotten piece of paper is what caused that seed to take root, strongly, in his mind.

Your Anil Dada was a longtime friend of my Papa. They went to school and college together. And Anil Dada once told me that Papa's nickname among his school friends was Ghoda. It's the hindi word for horse. And that's what your Dada was, a work horse. Once that paper came across his path, and that idea of a scholarship rooted in his mind, it was only a matter of time before he got here.

And despite your Dada facing extraordinarily difficult circumstances, here we are.

If you could ask him yourself about why he came here, as I have tried to, he'd tell you that he came here "for a better life." I've thought many years about what he meant. It's a haunting thing to wonder - about what drives your father - because it is after all, an inevitable part of what drives his sons.

When he said a better life, I think he meant prosperity. And part of that means wealth. But prosperity - in the way I think your Dada meant it, and the way I mean it here in this letter - is not only wealth. It is much more than that.

Prosperity is thriving. It is reaching the height of our potential as human beings. Prosperity is creating surplus, and then having the honor of spreading it humbly and generously to others. Prosperity is what’s beyond the essentials needed to have our physical bodies survive - it is the jewels of knowledge, culture, art, virtue, and the audacity to dream of a better life. For ourselves, yes, but more importantly for ourselves and others.

In America, prosperity is intervening to end a world war. It is vaccines and splicing the gene. It is going to the moon and brokering peace on earth. It is bringing children out of hunger and into love. It is the freedom to think beyond our daily bread and our tired and our poor. It is seeking to understand the mysteries of our universe.

American prosperity, I believe, is so much bigger than riches and spoils. American prosperity is the idea of creating the surplus we need so that we can then set our sights higher: on challenging the injustices of the present and enriching the future we may never ourselves benefit from, but others might. This unique notion of American prosperity - a prosperity that is for ourselves and others is what I think your Dada thought of when he contemplated a better life. A dream he ventured across the ocean and into an unknown land to be part of.

Because in America we are not just handed a brush and asked to paint something, we as a people, are driven to create the canvas on which others, namely our children, can paint. In America, we are called not just to be the consumers of prosperity, but to also be its producers.

Prosperity for ourselves and others.

I tell you all this because yesterday was an interesting day.

Yesterday, Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris became the President and Vice President-elect of the United States, our country.

This is what your Dadi said to me in a text message last night:

Me: Did you watch Biden’s speech?
Dadi: Yes. Biden & Harris both speech was outstanding. I am happy. First time in my life I enjoyed president results.
Me: It’s crazy how much of a difference it feels because our VP is half Indian. It feels like we belong here now.
Dadi: Yes beta. You, Bo & Myles will touch the sky in this country. I see that. Papa’s dream will come true.

This week, 74 Million Americans asked someone who looks like you, and who looks like me, and who looks like mommy to serve the nation. 74 Million.

But why I tell you both this is not because I want to emphasize that some barrier has been broken and a glass ceiling has been shattered, though it has. I want to tell you what that ceiling shattering means.

It would be easy for us to feel today that this ceiling shattering is an opportunity for us individually to grow and thrive and become more prosperous, because an invisible barrier is now gone. That the broken ceiling is for us.

That is not the lesson of today.

The lesson of the day is that there is no more doubt that we belong here, and that does provide us more opportunity. But there are no more excuses to be made out of not belonging, either. We can no longer claim to feel that we don't belong and let it be a reason we don't contribute.

The lesson of today - with the shattered glass of broken ceilings - is that we have an invitation and obligation to live out the broad, ever expanding notion of American prosperity - a dream your Dada risked everything for - not just for ourselves, but for ourselves and others.

Imagining a world with less shouting

Robyn forwarded me a three-day “no-shout challenge” that she heard about through a speaker at conference she attended. I made it two and a half days, and every hour was hard. I didn’t realize how much I shouted at my son until I tried to stop.

The challenge helped me to understand why I shouted and think of an alternative pattern of behavior.

Upon reflection, I realized that I shout because my most foundational belief about parenting is that what I owe my sons - above all else - is to help them become good people. So when my son deliberately screams to wake up his big brother, or bites me, or doesn’t follow what I believe to be a high-standard of conduct, that moves me from zero to ten in a second. That’s my baggage, not his.

I decided that my replacement behavior would be to say, “neither of us are perfect, but we are going to figure this out” when my temper was rising, instead of shouting.

But the point here is not that I am cured of shouting (I’m not even close). The point is to share what happened after I started shouting less.

We have been struggling a lot as a family during this pandemic. In many ways, this period of our lives has been a blessing, but it has been a trying time. Our elder son, now, is very aware of the virus and he misses our family, his friends, and his teachers at school. He’s confused about why he has to give far-away hugs and why he can do certain things but not others.

He’s also a toddler, so we have had power struggles over really small things as is the case with most families.

But when Robyn and I started this challenge and began shouting less, something changed for the better in our house. In a word, everything deescalated.

We still all have tantrums, but they are less intense. We still have power struggles, but we’re able to take a breath more quickly that before. Bo says “excuse me” to get our attention more, instead of screaming indiscriminately. Sometimes, instead of shouting we find a way to talk about his sadness and confusion, even though he barely has grasp of the words and concepts needed to express what he’s feeling.

Again, there is still shouting in our house, and I’m not proud of how I act on many days. But even just shouting less has created more space to listen, love, and resolve the very real problems we have. We have not reached the promised-land of a fully peaceful house, but we are on a different trajectory than we were.

While this was all happening, Robyn and I have been observing, listening, and talking intensely every night about the problems of race in our country. It its something that we are deeply stirred by, personally and professionally.

Because we saw a reduction in shouting bring about real and almost immediate change in our own household, I can’t help but wonder what might happen if we shouted less when trying to resolve community issues.

Say if we all just decided we would stop shouting for a week or a month, what would happen? In my wildest dreams, I wonder if that could be the very humble beginning of a transformation that eventually got us to a moment where we could live in a community where shouting was no longer needed.

The skeptic in me feels that this type of scaling is difficult and perhaps impossible. After all, Robyn happened to attend a conference, where she heard a speaker, who shared a no-shout challenge, and we happened to try it out. Getting to the point of trying to intentionally shout less resulted from a lucky mix of circumstance, humbling work, and serendipity.

In our household - whether it is us as parents or our children - someone had to take the first step. And luckily, it is clear that the first step to a no-shout home was our responsibility as parents.

But with complex disagreements that are compounded by hundreds of years of pain and violence - like race, poverty, and others - it’s less clear whose responsibility it is to take the first step. Moreover, that first step of not shouting takes incredible courage, humility, and grace.

I pray that I can summon that courage, humility, and grace whenever I need to take that first step. Being ready to take that first step is something worth preparing for, even if my number never is called to lead in that way. It is for all of us.

Racism, Reform, and the Second Commandment

In these very dark times, I am struggling to make sense of what is happening in the aftermath of George Floyd’s unfathomably cruel murder by a Minneapolis Police Officer. For a lot of reasons.

We live in a predominately black city. I have worked as a Manger in our Police Department for the better part of the last five years, so I’ve seen law enforcement from the inside. I am, technically speaking, a person of color with mixed-race children. We live in a mixed-race neighborhood.

And of course, there’s the 400+ years of institutionalized racism in the United States that I have begun to understand (at least a little) by reading about it and hearing first-hand accounts from friends who have felt the harms of it personally.

And as I’ve stewed with this, I keep asking myself - what are we hoping happens here? What do we want our communities to be like on the other end of this?

Because something is palpably different this time. George Floyd’s murder feels like it will be the injustice that (finally) sparks a transformation.

What I keep coming back to in contemplation, reflection, and prayer is the second greatest commandment - “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy self.”

What I hope for is to live in a place where I can have good neighbors and be a good neighbor. The second greatest commandment is the most elegant representation of what I hope for in communities that I have ever found.

I interpret this commandment as a call to love. We must give others love and respect, even our adversaries. If loving our neighbor requires us to do the deep work of growing out of the fear, disrespect, and hate in our hearts then we must do it. Rather, we are commanded by God to do it.

But in the world we live in today, we can avoid the deep work of personal transformation if we choose to. If we don’t love our neighbors, we can just move somewhere with neighbors we already like. More insidiously, we can also put up barriers so that the people we fear, disrespect, or hate, can’t live in our neighborhood even if they wanted to.

This seems exactly to be what institutionalized racism was and is intended to do. I don’t have to learn to love someone if I keep them out of my neighborhood through, redlining, allowing crummy schools elsewhere, practicing hiring discrimination, racial covenants, brutal policing, and on and on.

If we choose neighbors we already love as ourselves, we’re off the hook for removing the hate from our hearts and replacing it with love for them.

In this, I am complicit. Part of why we live in a city is because I didn’t want to raise mixed-race children in a white, affluent suburb. I didn’t want to deal with it, straight up.

I say this even though I acknowledge that places like where I grew up are probably much more welcoming than they were 15 years ago. Similarly, there are times that I’ve chosen to ignore, block, and unfollow people who I fear, disrespect, or disagree with. I have been an accomplice creating my own bubble to live in.

Adhereing to the idea presented in the second greatest commandment is really quite hard.

The problem is, I and any others who want to live in a truly cohesive, peaceful community probably don’t have a choice but to do the deep work that the second greatest commandment asks of us.

My intuition is that even if we dismantled institutionalized racism completely, that wouldn’t necessarily lead to love thy neighbor communities. They’d be more fair and just, perhaps, but maybe not loving.

And, I’m not even convinced we can completely dismantle racist institutions without more and more people individually choosing to do the deep work of replacing the fear, disrespect, and hate in their hearts with love.

Which leaves me in such a quandary - I truly do believe there are pervasively racist institutions in our society, still. And those institutions need to be reformed - specifically to alleviate the particularly brutal circumstances Black Americans have to live with.

But at the same time, I know I am a hypocrite by saying all this because I too have to do the deep work of personal transformation.

I did the Hate Vaccine exercise last week and realized how fearful and disrespectful I can be toward people from rural and suburban communities because of my race, job, and where I went to college. When I really took a moment to reflect, what I saw in myself was uglier than I thought it would be.

In community policing circles a common adage is that “we can’t arrest our way out of [high crime rates].” I have been wondering if something similar could be said for where we are today - can we reform our way out of racism?

Maybe we can. I honestly don’t have the data to share any firm conclusion. But my lived experience says no: the only way out of this - if we want to live in a love thy neighbor society - is a mix of transforming institutions and transforming all our own hearts.

Thank you to my friend Nick for pointing out the difference between the second commandment and second greatest commandment. It is updated now..