In this episode, we’re giving one last call to action for Americans to engage in critical thinking around our role in the democratic experience. The wake up call to become active citizens in our democracy has been compounded this year by a pandemic, economic crisis, civil unrest, divisive rhetoric and outcries for equality, liberty and justice among our black communities. No one is coming out of 2020 unchanged, this is our opportunity to change how we speak and how we behave so we can finally have an American Dream worthy of everyone.

HOMEWORK:

Show up. Do the work. Repeat.

RESOURCES:

Brene Brown – Dare To Lead (and really anything she’s ever done – TED, podcasts, books, articles, etc.)

Black Lives Matter photography by Jess Koehler.

TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to the final episode of Rebranding America, a series that explores the question: who would America be if it actually became who it said it was?

For the purposes of this series, we’ve been looking at this idea through the lens of marketing and branding. We dove into the brand promise of the American Dream and how we, as individuals, are the key to ensuring the dream is made possible through our nation’s core values of equality, liberty and justice for all. I’ve been clear about steps we must take as Americans to see our nation step into its mission of creating a democracy that is of the people, by the people, for the people. 

This series initially began as a personal experiment in response to my own tension around where we are as a nation. I did what many of you have done and wondered how I could contribute to making America more equitable, free and just for everyone. And then it hit me. What if I was hired to help rebrand America? How would I take an entire nation through my rebranding process? For fun, I dove into initial research and instantly uncovered aspects of the brand promise we made in the American Dream that I didn’t know. I learned more about the values we have documented in our Declaration of Independence, the evolution of rhetoric we’ve used to describe those values over the years, the hijacking of the American Dream for advertising purposes, the disconnect between our behavior and our words, and the adopted symbolism we’ve used to adorn ourselves that doesn’t tell the whole story. As we explored each step of my process together, I realized rebranding a nation begins with rebranding its citizens. Not an uncommon finding since corporate rebrands require behavioral shifts of employees and executives, but convicting since, as an American,  I’m the subject matter this time. And if you’re an American, so are you. 

With each episode, I found myself more challenged to dig deeper into my own complicit nature of upholding the standard of the American Dream I had inherited, not the one that was originally written. I’ve bought into the idea of working hard to acquire more. I’ve taken account of how many times I’ve felt like I’ve had to fin for myself because needing help is a sign of weakness. Then I’ve noticed how that impacts my perspective of those in our society who desperately need assistance and care even if they can’t ‘earn’ it. 

Brene Brown says in her book Dare to Lead, “Living into our values means that we do more than profess our values, we practice them. We walk our talk — we are clear about what we believe and hold important, and we take care that our intentions, words, thoughts, and behaviors align with those beliefs.”  

This experiment revealed misalignment in my own life between what I say I value and what that actually means as a citizen of this country. Before 2020, I wouldn’t consider myself an active participant in our democracy. Now, I realize how inextricably linked my absence and the oppression of other Americans is. I realize that just being opposed to the inequality, imprisonment and injustice of some isn’t the same as being for equality, liberty and justice for all.

America has allocated more money into ad campaigns than the work necessary to becoming who those ads say we are. As an American, I absorbed the messages that upholding our values was something I could buy. 

How we like to be identified symbolically isn’t matching up with reality. Our words fail to produce what we hoped they would. And as they failed to produce, we clung harder to a notion that, as long as it was true for us, then it was possible to be true for others …. so we isolated and worked hard to attain the dream of two cars and suburban property. The emptiness that came with trading togetherness for white picket fences that only served to cage in our self-made prisons, left us clinging to symbols of freedom to ignore how trapped we actually felt. If these symbols still stood high, then surely we just hadn’t done enough, bought enough, worked hard enough. And then we were forced to sit with ourselves in quarantine. We were forced into seeing the world differently, as though we had taken a journey to a far away place despite having only traveled to our dining room tables. 

We saw what we most feared: our numbing and pacifying wasn’t just killing our own souls, it was literally murdering our neighbors. To take one example, we upheld our personal freedom to not wear a mask at the expense of those who would bear the most damage – the very young, the sick, the grocery store worker whose name we don’t know – or the grandmother whose name we do. We have mistaken American freedom to be an individual right to do whatever we want no matter who else it effects rather than ensuring our actions do not serve to oppress or harm others. As I was doing more digging on the spiritual nature of the soul, an element I believe to be the heartbeat of all brands, I found this statement by Friar Richard Rohr:  “People the most obedient to commandment and church formulas can very often be the hardest to convert. They’ve taken the symbol for the substance. They’ve taken the ritual for the reality. They’ve taken the means for the end and become inoculated from the experience of the real thing.”

America has become a religion. One we’ve become so indoctrinated by that we have convinced ourselves that protecting our manmade dream of America at all cost is justified, even if it points people away from the foundational ideals. The few who dare to hold us accountable to our ideals are excommunicated. In modern time, we have Martin Luther King Jr. who demanded our leaders extend the values of equality, liberty and justice to people of color, particularly the black community, And was murdered as a result. The work of King and his team (including revolutionaries like John Lewis) gave way to activists like Gloria Steinem who has been demonized for her work in holding our leaders accountable to the values of equality, liberty and justice for women. Our efforts to excommunicate can be seen in the blatant attacks on Anita Hill and Dr Blasey Ford as they courageously enlightened Americans of sexual abuse among the top justice’s of our nation. All these people are seen as outliers for having been willing to venture out to have their minds changed by way of someone else’s experience and point of view. They’re seen as radicals, as threats, because they wish to hold us accountable to our promise. And we‘ve treated their cries for justice as a threat to our belief system, rather than a call to service. 

This year has been one giant call to service, relentlessly knocking on our doors and giving us a choice: answer or continue pretending we’re not home.

There is power in the American Dream … “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement” is palpable in the cries of the oppressed. Hope is still alive. So we’re left at the fork in the road that every brand find itself: replicate or evolve. 

While experts will say what we’re all collectively feeling is grief, I’ll take it one step further and say, we’re grieving the loss of who we were before the crises revealed who we truly are.

Who we were was familiar. We had a system for it that served us in the world we found ourselves navigating every day.

If we choose to replicate, the repercussions of our behavior will compound over time until we’re so unacquainted with who we are that obstacles great and small send us into an identity crisis. I would argue we’re already there. But just in case you need further convincing that continuing on this path will lead to our collective demise, know that no one buys the knock off without wishing they could afford the real thing. We all long for a nation that lives out all of its deepest dreams of equality, liberty and justice for all. 

No one is coming out of 2020 unchanged, which means we all have permission to re-evaluate. Everyone can emerge from this year as a truer version of themselves which is not only desperately needed, but also the most divine opportunity we’ve had in our lifetime to right the ship.

To get this rebrand right, we, the people of these United States, have to evolve. We have to use change and adversity as a launchpad to innovation, creativity and joy. We do this by removing systems, behaviors and beliefs that no longer serve us or keep us in constant compromise of our values. Things are going to get uncomfortable. We’re going to have to make sacrifices. We’re going to have to apologize, A LOT. And mean it. We’re going to have to make things right by doing more and talking less. Mostly, we’re going to have to keep showing up to make this dream a reality, even when we get bored with it because we can’t see how today’s actions shape a future we may not get to experience. There are unseen consequences of our choices and actions, the most devastating of which is the choice of silence and complacency. We have to get rid of this belief that our voice doesn’t matter, our purchasing decisions don’t have an impact and that our presence in the world isn’t just what it needs to feel alive again. 

We have so deeply bought into the American dream being about STUFF that doing things for others has been rejected as an attempt to take away our possessions and violate our freedoms. 

So what are we going to do with all this mess?

We start with where we are. The requirement for the United States to evolve by way of a crisis is a commitment to a vision, a knowledge of what matters most to you and clarity in how you are uniquely positioned to solve problems related to those values. It can not be overstated that values are not aspirational. People who are in a constant state of evolution know that we evolve around our values, not around buzzwords. These values have to be lived out every single day, in every interaction.

A lot of us are waking up for the first time. We’re learning that the United States’ systems aren’t broken, they were designed to oppose our stated values and vision. What a lot of us are realizing is that we’ve been culpable because we were hoping these structures would do for us what we didn’t have the courage to do for ourselves: stand for something. What we see in crisis is that these very systems we put our faith in are feeble. What’s worse…we’ve been complicit. 

Our nation is built on this idea that he who owns land, rules the land. But, since the dawn of this nation, those who live on the land, nurture it, and make it their home have been saying, “I the dream can not be bought.” So we stand here again, a nation re-evaluating the bill of goods we have been sold. Have we sold out to expansion over the real work of evolving? Is this the America I want to be a part of?  If not, what are you going to do about it?

That stops today. You’re going to imagine what the future of this nation could look like. Your vision for the future is based on what matters most to you. If you care about the inequity, oppression and injustice surrounding the refugee crisis, your vision for America could be to work towards a world where refugees is a word of the past. If you care about the inequity, oppression and injustice surrounding our climate crisis, your vision for America could be to do as little harm to the environment and create systems for others to do the same. If you care about the inequity, oppression and injustice surrounding women, your vision for America could be to see a nation that offers equal pay for equal work, gender parity in the workplace, parental leave and access to affordable health care. If you care about the inequity, oppression and injustice surrounding the black community, your vision for America could be racial reconciliation through the acknowledgement, confession and complete eradication of slavery of black people in any form. If you care about the inequity, oppression and injustice surrounding abortion, your vision for America could be to see a decline in abortion by investing in systems that give women and children the resources and support they need to thrive in our communities. 

In order for this rebrand of a nation to create an actual shift in the experience we’ve promised, we need every single touch point of our brand to reflect our values. That’s why we need everyone, in every corner of our society to engage in ways that are unique to their talents, resources and immediate circles of influence. 

I’m not here to tell you that you have to do everything. I’m here to tell you to choose something. Root it in your values so it’s harder to waver, give it language so you can turn your beliefs into behavior, decide who you intend to serve and repeat this until your time with us has come to an end. As an American, how you choose to engage needs to ensure the equality, liberty and justice of all.

The American Dream isn’t dead. It lives in each of us through the human desire to be treated equally, live free from oppression and know that justice is on our side. It lives in our craving to belong to one another. 

A nation of the people, for the people, by the people, standing for the promise of equality, liberty and justice for all. This is a promise worth fighting for. This, is the American Dream.

Thank you for joining. Now, let’s get to work.