Birthright

My son,

You became an American citizen about a year ago. You don’t remember it now, you won’t remember it when you finally read this, and it didn’t mean to anything to you then. You had no say in it. At the insistence of your doctors, they ripped open your mother’s womb and plucked you out and forced you into the world. You screamed and you screamed and you screamed and that, that, was the moment you became an American. This is an identity that came to you by law and custom, but most importantly by birthright.

So too it was the moment you became Chinese. You are Chinese because I am Chinese, because my parents are Chinese and on and on it goes into a past none need account for. You have a claim to our language and our culture, to our rites and rituals, to claim your identity and your place among us by birthright.

So too it was the moment you became Hmong. You are Hmong because your mother is Hmong, because her parents are Hmong and on and on it goes into a past none need account for. You have a claim to their language and their culture, to their rites and rituals, to claim your identity and your place among them by birthright.

Three gifts of identity

You are all of these things and you have a right to these things, because we gifted them to you irrevocably the moment you were born. People, even people who love you, will try to take them away from you. They will insist you must be American or Chinese or Hmong and cannot be all three and they are wrong and you must never forget that they are wrong. Your birthright to these identities cannot be invalidated. But they can be stolen away.

What I need you to understand my son, is that people who have never met you will hate you. They need to hate you because your birthright is to have your feet planted in many worlds and they must find a way to exclude you and to do that, first they must hate you.

By law and custom you are American. You are American by the blood of your parents and you are American by soil on which you were born. Just for that, that, people who chant slogans about blood and soil already hate you even though they have never met you and will never meet you. They know that your birthright enriches you, and they hope to steal it to enrich themselves. It will never work, but they will still try.

This is a destiny that was laid upon you when you were born. With the life you didn’t ask for you were given gifts you did not earn and enemies you do not deserve. But you also have help.

Before I was your father I was your uncle’s brother, your yeh yeh and your nana’s son. I was born to a life I didn’t ask for, given gifts I didn’t earn, and enemies I did not deserve. With these I made friends and I loved and I did good in the world.

Before your mother was your mother she was your uncles’ and aunts’ sister and your tias and yawg’s daughter. She was born to a life she didn’t ask for, given gifts she didn’t earn, and enemies she did not deserve. With these she made friends and she loved and she did good in the world and eventually we met.

When your mother and I chose to marry we bound our families together, like it or not, got new enemies like it or not, and got new friends like it or not. Because these are bonds of love, and while loving someone is a choice, it also transcends choice to become something greater – a responsibility willingly borne beyond the whims of want. And we were cherished and known because true friendship and family is the greatest force of the world.

And so, to you, we give you still more gifts. Family and friends, relatives and cousins and aunts and uncles and those who are strangers by blood but are still aunts and uncles. They all know your name. They will love you and they guide you and they too will help you defend your birthright.

Gifts of family and friendship

We have given you all these gifts because they are yours by birthright, absolute regardless of whether you deserve them. But I hope, my son, I hope and I trust that you will rise to deserve them. Right and responsibility exist in tandem with each other, and they always have for you. The destiny that laid on you at your birth is also a debt that I hope you will choose to acknowledge.

You have been given worlds to plant your feet in so you may grow mighty and true. You have been given companions to nurture you and guard you from harm. You have been given love, so much love, so that you may love and be loved in a world constantly short of it. When the choice comes, I hope you choose to take advantage of these gifts, and when the choice comes, I hope you choose to not only be powerful but good. To be true friend and family, secure in your rights and happy in service to others.

You are my claim against the world, because I love you more than you any merit you can earn. And you are my gift to the world, because I believe you will choose to honor your birthright. That you will choose to walk the worlds in right and in responsibility.

Be powerful my son. Do good.

Mormons of La Mancha

I spend a decent amount of my time observing Mormons, most recently the drama that has followed Russell Nelson’s accession at the head of the First Presidency and appointment of Dallin Oaks as First Counselor, and Dieter Uchtdorf’s release from the same body. Uchtdorf is perceived as a “liberal” – an especially loaded term in deep-red Utah – and a leader committed to a compassion first attitude. Oaks is literally a lawyer and has a reputation for being conservative and legalistic. And in this melodrama, Mormons are teaching us despite themselves something important about America.

Actually, drama may be too severe of a word. See, Mormons, at least on Twitter don’t get mad and swear – they get sad and talk about how heartsick they are. It’s a very restrained form of culture war between factions that the winning, conservative, side has mostly pretended doesn’t exist. It’s a very false sort of civility but one that in these trying times I take comfort in as I observe one of my favored subjects. Despite being a nevermo (never having been a Mormon) I’m familiar with them through my oldest surviving friendship. My best man was and is a Mormon and through him and a long study of American religion I’ve fallen a little in love with the quirkiness of the culture and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints itself. Like all religions and people worth knowing, they’re weird. Weird in a particular and often deliberate sort of way – a setting apart.

Mormons, everyone agrees, is a profoundly American faith. They are led by a President of the Church and his two counselors (vice presidents), and then a 12 member body called the Quorum of Twelve that everyone compares to the College of Cardinals but is really more like a board of directors. Then there are a series of quorums and regional presidencies and ranks of priesthood all the way down to the bottom where two 19 year olds with black ties, white shirts and bycicle helmets come to introduce you to the Book of Mormon. There is obsessive invocation of keeping the sabbath as a special day for God and family, the valorization of the nuclear family, modesty, modesty, modesty, and of course the prudishness about cigarettes, alcohol, caffeine and other drugs. Eden lies in America in Mormon belief, literally (if unimportantly) in Missouri, more figuratively and imminently in a 1950s America that never was. And that is where the magic is. Not in the undergarments, but in how Mormons form their counter-culture.

Most American cultural conservatives wind up somewhere in the 1950s, where men could be men and women were women and there were no divisive politics. And that’s all problematic for a lot of reasons, but the biggest one is that any responsibility of men in this vision is accessory to the privileges of the moment. When European men first started writing about the downfall of chivalry, they were writing about a time when rich, well armed thugs raped and pillaged their way through whatever they felt like, and oh yeah, something about how you’re supposed to write your love letters and the conditions under which you may stab someone of equal rank. Thuggery was reality, and chilvary is the dressing. The 1950s were a time of nuclear terror and systematic discrimination – Leave it to Beaver is the dressing. But just as Don Quixote bought into the fiction of chivalric Spain, Mormons aren’t selling us a fiction to get back to history. They’re trying to get back to the fiction. A bowderdized 1950s America, where the men don’t drink, don’t cuss, don’t smoke, and don’t cheat. Good fathers and kind husbands. Women who are pure and kept away from the uncleanliness of politics, which itself has been stripped clean of all personal ambition. That vain hope echoes as Mormons struggle against each other and accuse one another of bringing in politics to the mere choosing of an ecclesiastic and administrative head of their church. As they pretend that any twelve men, however holy, could be in perfect accord without distinction and meaningful disagreement. That Mormons, alone among cultures, can be without faction but the good and the self-aware bad.

Mormonism, like all Christianities worth examining, is riven by the great paradox of believing in man’s inherent sinfulness, created in the image of God. Their solution is not mine, but it is beautiful in its own way. They exist not merely to perpetuate, but to instantiate a myth of America. A mere story. But what can a nation built on an idea be but a story that we choose to instantiate. And the Mormons have chosen to see the American story where men and women structure their lives to be pure, good, and full of joy. If I don’t believe in their version, I should still be trying to do them one better.