Subject: Fwd: Memorial Day parade in Princeton
From: Cheryl Mills <[email-masked]>
To: John Podesta <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 May 2015 18:12:04 -0400

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Anne-Marie Slaughter <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, May 23, 2015 at 4:58 PM
Subject: Memorial Day parade in Princeton
To: Hillary Clinton <[email-masked]>
Cc: Huma Abedin <[email-masked]>, Jake Sullivan <[email-masked]>,
Cheryl Mills <[email-masked]>, Margaret Williams <
[email-masked]>

 Hillary -- I truly hope that you can find a minute to read this. I will
publish it on New America's Medium channel, but wanted to send it to you
directly. I think it is very much a part of what you are about.
Best,
AM

 A New America

 Today was the Memorial Day parade in Princeton. It was a postcard day; the
sky a deep blue, the sun sparkling, the air sharp with an invigorating
spring chill. I walked into town to get my hair done and happened to follow
the parade route, which starts just near our house. After a couple of
blocks, passing the firetrucks, the motorcycle riders, the marching bands,
the kids, tears began streaming down my cheeks. Tears of joy, and of that
emotion that I have recently learned only older people can experience -
poignancy. That bittersweet feeling of happiness and sadness combined:
pleasure in the present mixed with awareness of loss, the fragility of the
moment, the ever-marching passage of time.

The tears came in part because of the achingly wonderful small-townness of
it all. The parade included the fife and drum corps of local musketeers,
Little League teams, the 4H club, cub scouts and Eagle scouts, the local
chapter of the New Jersey national guard. And the crowds on the sidewalks
were overwhelmingly families, parents and grandparents pushing strollers
and keeping excited toddlers and elementary school kids close. Older
couples too, holding hands, and periodically a knot of veterans honoring
the day. The police kept order at intersections, smiling with the crowd.

My emotions may have been particularly strong because I am tired.  I flew
to Malaysia and back this week to give a speech, a four-day marathon that
turned into five because of one delayed flight that led to a cascade of
rescheduling. That kind of travel wreaks havoc on the body and disorients
the mind, hours working on a screen in a darkened airline cabin, sleeping
in snatches when it is noon at your destination but midnight at home, being
served breakfast at the end of one flight just before landing only to take
off again on a red-eye to get home. To be finally in my own bed again last
night was particularly sweet, a sensation of being *home *that perhaps
painted the parade and my neighbors in brighter and more intense colors
than usual.

But I think it was more than that. For so much of my trip the narrative in
my head was a steady drumbeat of worry about the mess America is in
compared to Asia. The gleaming airports of Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur, in
which customs, immigration, and security lines move far more quickly and
efficiently than here (the Malaysians use much more advanced technology for
fingerprinting than we do). The ubiquitous, fast and free public wifi. The
express train that got me from the Hong Kong terminal to downtown in 20
silent, swift minutes. The sense of hope and possibility expressed by
everyone from drivers to bellboys.

When I landed at Kennedy on Friday morning, the usual endless lines for
customs and immigration were relatively short and the long walk from the
jetway to the terminal itself was through a corridor that was less
dilapidated than usual. But then it took longer to get from the
international terminal to my Delta flight to DC than the duration of the
subsequent flight: an endless and stupid merry-go-round of taking an air
train to one terminal to check in and go through our cumbersome and
inefficient airport security system to get to a set of gates that led me to
creaky makeshift stairways and an aging bus that took us to yet another
terminal and another set of gates before finally boarding the plane, with
no wifi available, much less free. And then my regular weekly commute on
Amtrak, which is surprising when the train is on time rather than when it
isn't, and is so bumpy that it is almost impossible to walk between the
cars even without carrying something, where in the winter the snow comes in
between the cars and the doors freeze - all this even without the specter
of last week's tragic crash.

The Memorial Day parade was not efficient or teched up. Princeton is a
wealthy town, but the parade route wended its way past a long-boarded up
former video rental store and many little restaurants and stores that
change hands every couple of years as small business owners realize they
cannot make a go of it. But what hit me over and over again, watching the
marchers, was the tremendous inclusion. The scout groups and marching bands
had kids of every color. One group of baton twirlers featured a heavy girl
with light purple hair who certainly would never had made the cut when I
went to school. Several of the white grandparents I saw were pushing
grandkids of different races. A number of the families watching had two
mothers or two fathers. Equally important, as I age, was to see how many of
the participants were older Americans - veterans, of course, but also
teachers, coaches and bandleaders investing their time in kids.

The stores lining the parade route were owned by Mexican-Americans,
Indian-Americans, Chinese-Americans. When I finally got to my hairdresser,
a Moroccan immigrant named Aziz who is practically part of our family, he
and I discussed the horrors of ISIS from the perspective of someone who
hates the damage it is doing to Islam. When I moved on to my local branch
of Bank of America, I looked up to hear an older white male bank manager
engaging in a long discussion with a client in fluent Spanish.

This is the new America. The United States has always been an immigrant
nation;  the original colonists created a political entity composed of
citizens who had dispossessed the native Americans who were already here.
For centuries our narrative was one of absorption: the melting pot that
dissolved old identities and cultures and forged a homogeneous national
narrative. Then it was multi-culturalism, a mosaic of different pieces. Now
it is *inclusion*: genuine belonging in the one whole of *e pluribus unum *but
without dissolution of the differences that make us strong. Because it is
all those differences -- old and young; black and white and every color in
between; Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and many more; gay and
straight; men, women, and transgender; old families and immigrants - that
creates the energy and creativity of multiple perspectives and experiences.
Difference provides a thick, many-layered quality to our society that makes
it much more difficult to march efficiently together in one direction but
that ensures a deep resilience when troubles come.

 If we can learn, once again, to embrace both difference and inclusion as
the heart of what being American means, we will be able to celebrate an
African-American president and elect a woman president. Better still, we
will launch a century of leaders of every race, religion, gender, and
sexual orientation who will no longer need hyphenated adjectives to
identify what kind of American they are. They will be new Americans,
citizens of a renewed America.