Witnessing the genocide in Gaza has been so eye-opening for me. I did not know how corrupt our county was and I did not know how corrupt the world was. And I should have known, but I didn’t. Surprise means I believed a lie. And the lie that I believed is that we can do bad, and somehow become good without ever facing our wrongs. That is not to say we cannot do good, or that there is nothing to be proud of, or that we are irredeemable, but time and good intentions alone can never heal our wrongs.

Do you know about the Twelve Steps? I really love them. I think they represent the best invention to ever come out of the United States. It’s a path to recovery from addiction- a difficult process that someone is only likely to do only after they have hit bottom and become desperate. It’s a way out. The most tangible part of the steps is the process of making amends- going through each of the people or parties you have wronged, and making right. Cleaning up your side of the street, it’s said.

I really want America to run the 12 steps in itself. Looking at the ongoing genocide in Gaza, this sham of a ceasefire, and all that led to it. Looking at the horrors going on in Sudan, the entrenched power systems represented by both these crises. Looking at our own country, the return to codified racism, the removal of legal residents, citizens, and asylum seekers from this country, the terrifying lack of visibility we have to detention and prison centers, the ICE raids on brown skinned people.

Why should we expect any better from our country? This country is founded in genocide. We are an unrecovered addict. We never faced or even attempted to make right our numerous crimes against indigenous people- genocide, ethnic cleansing, treaty violations. We just live that sin every day, though it’s easy to ignore those manifestations because the genocide was so total that we have erased the most obvious evidence of the crime.  But that doesn’t mean that the repercussions stop. They do continue in the very immorality of the society that permeates, the dehumanization that spreads. And so to enslavement. Ongoing systematic suppression of black people. Codified racism. Environmental destruction. Murder, rape, and imprisonment. The sins do not fade with time, then ripple and magnify. They reverberate in our foreign policy, in our so-called “defense”, our so-called “intelligence” agencies, our so-called “wars.”  It should be no surprise that the dehumanization continues. It changes shape, it changes borders, it changes nationalities or identities or excuses, but it never truly stops until recovery interrupts the cycle.

The 12 steps teach us to document first those we have wronged and then work our way through amends, which are essentially apologies with reparations. And remember, people work the steps for their own good- to save themselves from addiction and the spiraling descent into permanent misery. You do it for yourself, but of course those actions are extremely good for others. It’s the only way to stay in recovery and to stay well.

The approach we have now is not working. There are so many problems that we each feel like we can focus on only one, but, even then we make little to no progress. But what if there was another way? Ok, you care about the environment, and you want to solve climate change. And look around you- do you know a single person who lives in harmony with their environment? A single person who lives sustainably? Giving as much as they take and taking as much as they give? I don’t know a single person like that, let alone a society or a culture. But I look back to native people in this country before it was colonized, and I believe they were doing juts that. When we harmed those people, we harmed ourselves by losing the knowledge and ability to live in harmony. But there is hope here, too. The 12 steps have a concept of a “living amends” which is a way of acting when the debt can’t be repaid directly. The person is dead, for example, you can’t bring them back, and so what you do instead is live in a way that acknowledges and accounts for what has been taken.  Wouldn’t it be something, if in the process of looking back and making right, we began to treat our environment better? Solve the climate crisis? Economic crises? Wealth inequality and poverty? And learned to live differently? The problems we face feel so numerous that it is hard to imagine looking back at our past and dealing with things that seem to be behind us. But I’d argue that looking back is the only way forward, and that each of the problems we face could be made better by the amends-making process.

The only solution, that I can think of, is to work the program and to work the steps and to go through and make amends for what we have done as a country to ourselves, to each other, to our visitors, to other nations and to the environment. Just clean up our side of the street, as they say. And until then, just know that we are dealing with an addict. We’re dealing with an out of control, unhinged, unwell creature and so we can be sad about that and we can want better for it, but we cannot truly be surprised.