One of the advantages of living in Washington D.C. is being able to witness the annual bloom of the cherry blossom trees. For just three days, light pink fireworks pierce the sky in full bloom, as the spring breeze gently sweeps petals onto the ground. The cherry blossoms had been immigrants just like us, donated by Japan in 1912. Transported from afar, yes, but planted, rooted, admired, integrated into the woven fabric of the representation of one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

The 250th anniversary of the longest-running democracy in the world arrived on July 4th. Amidst declarations from the Trump administration touting that the U.S. had finally reached net negative migration across the country, the nation’s capital was home to a spending spree of military parades, prayer events, and fireworks to commemorate a nation that had toiled through hardship and had now formed a more perfect union of unimaginable prosperity. Or so we are told.

A land of dreams and sorrows

America had been the dream for my immigrant grandfathers from India, who settled in the 1960s to pursue higher education. My mother’s father, lured by the chance to carve his own path outside of his family, found his first job as an oil & gas engineer on the streets of the emerging fossil fuel hub of Houston, Texas, where the riches of black crude transformed lush wetlands and rolling prairies into snaking highways and sprawling suburbs. My father’s father began his PhD dissertation in the segregated halls of the American South and finished it after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. To my grandfathers, the 1960s in America were imbued with a dynamism only possible in lands so free with opportunities so abound. This was the land of rapid economic growth and affordable home ownership, of moon landings and multi-story department stores. Letting themselves be taken by the winds of America, they had planted roots. They brought their wives from India, had children, and hoped to see their legacies blossom in the bountifulness of our country’s soils.

Sixty years later, I know a different America. Perhaps as a function of taking America’s material offerings for granted, I’ve learned to criticize the “price of progress” that my grandparents so greatly admired. I do not see abundant hope; I see merciless conquest. My blood pumps the panic of a nation’s capital struggling to control the raging, imperialist impulses of the most powerful man in the world. My lungs circulate the grief of pristine landscapes beaten into submission by concrete and fertilizer, ever-expanding and ever-destroying, sucking in water and oxygen and oil and shitting out its tailings into the scrapyard of forgotten people. There is no room to breathe. There is just corporate slop piled onto screens pacifying us into nameless buyers and sellers of products built by hands far away, constructed with the blood of rivers and the carcasses of mountain-faces. The price of progress is our lack of mercy. Other nations, ecosystems, our morality, strangled under the knee of human supremacy. I can’t breathe. It feels impossible to reconcile the differences between my grandparents’ Americas and my own. But my family’s history tells me that America’s endless advances have also been its fatal mistakes. America had promised my father success for his brilliance. His academic success, his ambition, and his outward confidence propelled him to become a physician. As he ascended, he held more stories in his heart: those of a doting father who had left his village in the hopes that his children could grow alongside America; the lives of his patients; his own children that had rooted to him; a son that admired the books sprawled upon his desk and the curly hair on his head; and a disease consumed him the faster he rose. The winds of America took him where they promised—economic stability and social status—but they took his demons too. They took the insecurities of a man desperately performing whiteness to escape his Indian identity and the pressure he put on himself to keep expanding in the land of opportunity. They gifted him the wealth that the American dream could offer, and the means to soothe a depressed soul with bottles of liquor. They gave him the status of physician and the means to hide an addiction through his cleverness. But he could only run so far, reach so high, before his heart’s decay caught up with his ambition.

When he could no longer practice medicine, he pursued entrepreneurship with fervor. Everything was a problem to be solved, a challenge of personal will. Whether it was new medical innovations that he tried to commercialize, startups he joined ever so briefly before betraying his sobriety, or the next investment opportunity in a cryptocurrency, his yellowing eyes lit up and his hollowing cheeks filled. The books on his shelves transitioned from medical journals to self-improvement and stock market investment guides. He was manifesting the dream of America–that if he kept clawing and climbing out of the hole of self-loathing through his ambition, he could escape the demons that accompanied him. 

America was not my father’s killer. But his story is the thread of America that delivers wealth with loneliness, that offers expansion without a ticket home, that tells you to run and not look back but does not warn you of the abyss ahead. A country whose constitutional promise was endless ambition produces such great men, such hearts that can never plant roots because they are always looking to escape to virgin soil.

The cherry blossoms show these faces of America. They are immigrants that settle and burrow roots in expansive lands. They are children who bloom into flowers, shining brilliantly and reaching towards the sun. And yet they can only go so far before they lose the support of their branch. As they fall, their children, their pollen and seeds, are carried away by the winds of America, trying to make sense of whether they are broken or free.

The cherry blossoms speak

My father taught me that there was always something to reach for in the vastness of America, whether it be wealth, status, or achievement. I reach like him, but outward rather than upward. Reaching led me to pursue climate advocacy and carried me thousands of miles away to another continent to study how Indigenous peoples defended their lands against corporate extraction. To a large extent, I reach outward to favor my imagination over the anger I have with my country. Reaching explains why I am enraptured by crises—they enable me to imagine utopias of a crisis-free world, a future squarely opposite of the present. Despite my criticism of my country, I am deeply American, susceptible to the unrelenting optimism fueled by conquest and greatness that courses through its veins.

But I also believe my ambition and my actions are motivated by something that afflicted my father—I am equally as terrified of landing as he was. In continually searching for solutions and basing my identity upon some version of virtuosity, I protect myself from understanding my weaknesses. When not fueled by anger and optimism, I am consumed by indecision. When not motivated by morality, I am eaten alive by my cynicism. My greatest fear is that if I cannot accomplish greatness through ambition, I will be absorbed into the soil and forgotten. But if I can reach my hands everywhere—with the plight of others, with struggles far away, with empathy for the unnamed—I can save everything before I fall. Maybe I reach just as he did, because I can never place myself in a land, in a home, in a history, like the roots of the cherry blossom.

As America celebrates its birthday, I believe many of us Americans feel lost amidst the cherry blossoms in a country which has erased so many histories to advance a singular one. One Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for some. The cherry blossoms teach me that a tree cannot stand tall to see those around it if it lacks roots. I’ve attempted to stop trying to save everything around me—the ecosystems, all the people I cannot see—because I know that I will fall like my father if I keep externalizing my inherent value. In doing so, I’ve aspired to make sense of the intertwining stories that form my own roots: my hometown’s tropical storms alongside its recovering prairies; of my grandparents’ losses and their dreams; of my father’s decay and my mother’s resilience; of my anger and my empathy. The blossoms, in their centuries-long endurance amidst an America of ambition and conquest, teach me that beauty endures by tending to the survival of stories and resisting their erasures.

Like a political moment, the beauty of cherry blossom blooms also comes from its fragility, as the delicacy of perfectly perched flowers shakes at the lightest showers or faintest winds. For the vast majority of the year, the trees camouflage behind green foliage. Like successful movements, the trees continue to grow, even if their flowers are not searching for new soil. America can learn from this, both literally in its imperialist aggressions, and figuratively, as it contends with the multitude of stories that have been buried beneath its grand facade. In the bleakness of an administration hell-bent on conquest, it is the job of Americans to recover the stories that have been lost.

My anger towards America’s paradoxes cannot subside, not while it manufactures steel beams for private prisons or abundant bounties of shelf-stable food in degraded soils, and not least while it grinds the world towards its vision of “development” while its residual petroleum corrodes the rail on which it spins. And yet, beneath my criticism for my country lies a deep love. My love comes not from America’s history nor its present, but for the soil that she has given my family’s triumphs and tragedies. That is what I celebrated on July 4th—the chance to remember the roots that shaped me and commit to protecting them amidst the winds of America.

This piece was written by Rishab Jagetia in his personal capacity, and the opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect the view of his employer.