BlueOctopus 🇺🇲 ✝️

America, you are the only country on Earth that cannot see how bright it is. There's an old saying in Japan: the darkest spot is at the foot of the lighthouse. The light goes out across the whole sea. Ships a hundred miles away steer by it. But the people standing right underneath it? They're in the dark. They have no idea. That's you. You are standing at the foot of the lighthouse. So here's what it looks like from out here, on the water. And please don't interrupt me, because I'm Japanese, and it took me a lot of courage to be this loud. You build tiny wooden houses on posts in your front yards. You fill them with your own books. You put a little door on them with no lock, and you let complete strangers take whatever they want. You call it a "little free library." In my country, a small wooden house where you leave gifts for people you will never meet has a different name. We call it a shrine. When something terrible happens in one of your cities, by sundown there is a line around the block. Not to look. To bleed. Thousands of people, standing for hours, to give their own blood to someone they will never meet. There have been nights your hospitals had to send people home, because there was too much of you. Every August, your teachers walk into stores and spend their own money on crayons. Not for their own kids. For twenty-eight children who aren't theirs yet. Nobody asks them to. They do it every year, like a prayer. Tonight, somewhere in Ohio, a man who worked fifty hours this week is standing in the cold, coaching nine-year-olds who can't catch, for free. He bought the snacks himself. He will do this for eleven years. Nobody will ever give him a trophy. He'll be too busy handing them out. You think this is normal. You think everybody does this. America. Everybody does not do this. Now let me tell you about one light. Just one. Eleven years ago, my wife's cousin's daughter, Hinako, followed her father's job to a town of eleven hundred people in North Dakota. She was nine. She knew exactly zero words of English. That whole first winter, she didn't say anything to anyone. Not at school. Not at home. She just walked to school and walked back, past a little free library on the corner, outside the house of an old widower named Orrin. One morning in November, there was a Japanese picture book inside. The next week, there was another one. Every single week, for a year, there was a new Japanese book in that box. In a prairie town a very, very long way from any Japanese bookstore. Hinako took every one. She read them at night under her blanket. By spring, she was laughing again. By the next fall, she was reading English. She never knew who did it. She was nine. She thought it was magic. This summer, Hinako went back. She's twenty now. She knocked on Orrin's door to finally say thank you. Orrin had died in March. His daughter let her in. On the kitchen table, there was a stack of receipts from a bookstore in Seattle. Fifty-two of them, held together with a rubber band. And a spiral notebook, in an old man's careful handwriting. Orrin couldn't read Japanese. He never knew what any of those books said. He just wrote down the date every morning, and one word. "Taken." His daughter said he stood at the front window every morning at 7:45 to watch the little girl walk past the box. "Those were his favorite seven seconds of the day," she told Hinako. "He said you were the only one who ever needed it." Orrin never thought he was doing anything special. Neither do you. That's the thing about lighthouses. They never see their own light. So let me be the ship out on the water for one minute, and report what we see. From over here, America, you're blinding.