My Privilege Made Me Grieve Losing an America That Never Was

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast · Apr 5, 2025 · 6m

I’ve shed many misplaced tears recently.

For a while I thought I was grieving over the loss of America; that I was missing something we used to be, a place we once were, a new national erosion of hope I thought I'd been witnessing.

I imagined this great attrition was the source of my recent despair, mistakenly believing I was lamenting something that had at one time been here but was now gone. It wasn't until recently that I fully realized that I'd been mourning the death of a ghost.

I haven't been missing America, I've been missing an America I wanted to be, an America I imagined to be—an…