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Kamala's Coconut Tree Is Actually Quite Profound [1]

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Date: 2024-07-29  

What a week for the Kamala Coconut Tree! The controversy, the scorn, the adulation, the parodies, the memes! For those who may have just fallen out of a coconut tree themselves, here it is again:

“My mother used to — she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,”

To me, this anecdote is not just amusing — although it is that. I find it profound. We exist in context and context matters. It’s the same insight that underlay Barack Obama’s maligned but basically true observation, “You didn’t build that,” and even Hillary’s “It takes a village.” It’s a point well worth making, and repeating.

It takes nothing away from Tom Brady to note that without the invention of the game of football, stadiums, support staff, the NFL, television, and millions of fans – plus about a hundred other things he had no control over whatsoever – his emergence as the GOAT would not have been possible or even conceivable. Similarly, everything we have in life is dependent in myriad ways on others – past and present. This essay I’m writing – whatever you may think of it – is the work of millions, from the roaster of the coffee I’m drinking to the teachers who educated me to the discoverers of the electricity that keeps my laptop humming.

Recognizing and contemplating this incontestable truth instills humility – not only on insufficiently-grateful or overly-entitled kids but in all of us, and particularly those who ascend to leadership positions. It naturally instills compassion, gratitude, generosity, and forgiveness. It opens a path for leaders to consider factors such as economic inequality, institutional racism and systems of oppression – not in order to deny the possibility of individual agency or to crush everyone into equity-based conformity – but to ask how we might improve the lives of those we depend on and make our union more perfect.

Because the fact is, we are all in this together. We all have our part to play, our skills to contribute. And when we recognize that, we naturally want to achieve progressive priorities. We understand that when we all have enough to eat, health care, safe streets, good schools, a climate capable of sustaining human life, an economy that works for everyone, and a politics that fairly represents us – we’ll not only be more prosperous, more secure, and more productive -- everyone’s just going to be in a better mood. It’s fun to succeed together!

On the other hand, when this lesson is forgotten, and we think we just dropped out of a coconut tree, Keith Richards style, ego and narcissism and entitlement can run rampant resulting in impatient, arrogant, dictatorial governing in the style of Donald “Only I can fix it” Trump and his minions, or the ongoing tragicomedy of Elon Musk’s Dr. Evil-style megalomaniacal meltdown.

So it bears repeating that no, we did not just fall out of a coconut tree and become king or queen of our domain. Everything we have, everything we are, everything we do exists in a context that we all create together. Kamala Harris’s mother was a wise woman, the coconut tree is a powerful metaphor, and the fact that it stuck with Kamala speaks highly of her as a leader and as a human being.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/7/29/2259109/-Kamala-s-Coconut-Tree-Is-Actually-Quite-Profound?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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