Editor’s note: This essay is part of Deseret Magazine’s cover story “How to heal America’s partisan divide.”
We are all marked, shaped by our beginnings.
Mine as an American started with a “Freedom Flight” out of Varadero Airport, Cuba, in 1969. Window seat, my suited father by my side, my mother in front of us trying to keep my rambunctious little brother in check.
Our hearts broken by leaving everyone and everything we loved behind, I nursed in my young heart the useful emotion of hope amid uncertainty.
Three months earlier, the Americans had walked on the moon.
A country that had accomplished this unimaginable feat, I told my 10-year-old self, couldn’t possibly be as bad as we were told in school by teachers forced to indoctrinate children to hate “los yankis.”
Applause rang through the cabin as we landed in Miami, bittersweet tears flowed, and from that moment, my introduction to the United States and my alliance to this country was sealed.
The memory of this point of leaving and arrival — of rupture and repair — keeps me grounded in troubled times. It connects me not only to who I was, an immigrant child, but to what America was, and I believe still is despite the ugly talk, a nation of immigrants.
At the barracks where we were processed at Miami International Airport, kind people offered us ham sandwiches and Coca-Cola. An older woman, a volunteer, approached me and gave me a small handmade green teddy bear made of cloth.
Her gesture touched me.
I had been forced to leave all but a small doll out of my beautiful collection, now property of the state.
A club to which this woman belonged had made the bears for the Cuban refugee children arriving on what became a historic exodus that brought 265,000 Cuban exiles to the United States between 1965 and 1973.
Fifty-one years later, with the unprecedented times we’re living weighing on my mind, my heart swells at the memory of a welcoming America, beacon of democracy to the world.
Strong and steady in times of strife, land of refuge and opportunity, this is the America I’ve hung on to.
Strong and steady in times of strife, land of refuge and opportunity, this is the America I’ve hung on to for the last four years, when I’ve felt alienated and damaged by the political rhetoric and the disheartening divisions among us growing wider everyday.
It’s hard to hold up a mirror to our own politics, but it’s easy to judge, with or without facts, The Other.
Yet, it is the diversity of experiences and the richness of cultures that distinguishes this land from sea to sea. All that immigrants have brought through the generations from other parts of the world are what makes us most American, unique and exceptional.
But we’ve shattered the joy of our own house.
Restoration requires healing.
The need for healing implies the existence of loss.
We have, in our discord, indeed lost something precious to our national identity. We have become a fractured “we, the people.” It has left us in a state of angst, grief, and its twin brother, anger.
It is the diversity of experiences and the richness of cultures that distinguishes this land from sea to sea.
It has made us bitter.
In a misguided shift of blame for our problems, we have lost the innocence with which America embraced and welcomed The Other — and we have left a deep wound.
An election behind us, a hopefully peaceful transfer of power ahead of us, how can we heal our individual and our collective national souls?
We heal by sharing our truths.
We heal by reaching deep into our capacity for empathy and kindness.
We must, at least, attempt to reach out, not as partisans but as participants in democracy.
We’re a nation in pain, torn apart by a political divide now deeply entrenched. But it is possible to search for common ground, to find redemption and reconciliation on our way back, if not to each other, at least to civility and coexistence in our communities.
There’s so much on our plates to resolve.
Make room for people like me, forever touched by the kindness of a stranger.
We can heal if we dare to listen and engage with those with whom we disagree without hurling insults.
We can heal if we step out of red and blue corners, acknowledge that personal experience plays a significant role in shaping our political views — and create spaces where we can share our stories, our humanity.
Make room for people like me, forever touched by the kindness of a stranger and now part of the tapestry that is us, the United States of America.
And never, never underestimate the healing power of a frumpy little bear placed in a little girl’s hands.
Fabiola Santiago is a Miami Herald columnist and author of the novel “Reclaiming Paris.”
This story appears in the January/February issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.