Americans! Who are We? By James Kim

It was a cool day. The mild mid-morning air lulled me as I trotted up the steps into that familiar diner where occasionally I like to wolf down a plate of pastrami, corned beef, topped with melted mozzarella, and a hunk of bread on the side to get my blood pressure palpitating to the max. Dan Lee and I ate – though this time I decided on a turkey burger deluxe with a side of steamed broccoli – and we exchanged glances, words of biting profundity, phrases of comic absurdity, ideas for spiritual edification.
He stirred his mid-morning tea when he started a new page in our dialogue, “I read this book, man. It’s called the Strengths Finder 2.0, and apparently, our parents were wrong.”
“Wrong?” I looked up quizzically, as if he had uttered a sacrilege. “How’s that?”
“Well, recall with me times when you’d bring a report card to you parents.”
“Okay – ”
“Isn’t it true that instead of them praising you for the areas you excelled in they focused on the areas of your weakness? They always say to bring those lower grades up. This book, however, teaches people to focus on their strengths and to develop those… You should try it out so we can compare notes later.”
It was true. That’s exactly how my parents reacted when I showed them my morbidly blemished report cards. Hence I became curious about what this book and its assessments had to say about my strengths so I bought one on Amazon. After taking a fairly long, timed test online I was given a list of my top five strengths. The first strength was “context.” Basically, what that means is that I’m the kind of person who likes to see life in its historical context; for me, all things can be figured out by knowing or understanding the history of something and knowing where that something stands. I was so sold on it that I nearly quit my studies in literature and philosophy to switch over to history and anthropology.
That long point brings us to the thesis of this commentary, where do we stand? Love in our historical context (for the most part) is regarded as transitory pleasure stemming from our significant other(s), excluding commitment and sacrifice. War for Americans is an abstraction so intangible it is reduced to a televised sport for adults. Prosperity and success is relative only to the achievements of our immediate neighbors and not to eighty percent of the world who have only twenty percent of the money outside of our own. Prophecy against such ideas is considered extremist, retrograde, or an act of self-righteous diatribe. If this is where we stand today, how do other people, who stand in other places, view us?
In China, where I served as an assistant to a missionary, I was both a farmer and an English teacher. One particular day on the field, the sun was burning hot. Brother Peng and I stopped plowing and rested to catch our breaths. Overhead, a plane flew by and he sighed deeply expressing his wish to be able to fly one day. He looked over at me, pointed to the plane, and said that after several more months I’d be on a plane like that back to America – he thought me lucky to leave that place of toil and blistering heat into a land flowing with milk, honey, and busty babes.
In response I tried to explain to him that it was really relative; that though I may be richer and more fortunate than he, he was relatively fair in his economic standing as a farmer in his own country. I said he needed to see the situation in light of where he stood contextually: “Don’t compare yourself with a relatively richer Westerner. It won’t get you anywhere to think that way.” But then he posited something which pushed my hairline back a few inches: “Then why don’t you stay here, take my life, and let me go to America in your stead!” I could only respond with a grimace.
The thought burrowed itself deep into my head and lit up every nerve available within it. Why was I born where I was born, and why was Brother Peng born where he was born? What makes my life so much more valuable than his? Further, what makes an American life so much more valuable than the life of someone who was born and raised in a third world nation? You might say that it isn’t true that some people are worth more than others. I believe that, too. But I’m not trying to prove what is true and what is not; I’m proposing that our lives are contrary to our convictions. We simply don’t live the way we feel because if we did, we’d give more.
Following the mental skirmish, I was able to come up with a system like that of a moral symbiosis. Of course, I thought, there is a reason, a clearly divine one, for why I was born a rich American and Brother Peng was born a poor farmer: the relationship between me and him gives opportunities to us both. I was given the opportunity to give aid, and he was given the opportunity to be blessed by the giving. The former gets to practice love through generosity, the latter gets to be the recipient of grace.
Aid takes many different forms. Education is a form of aid; money, too; and mere forgiveness instead of revenge is another. Whatever the aid might be, when we give each other grace, it doesn’t matter anymore on what historical/contextual ground we stand because the act of mercy is inherently divine.