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"Where are you from?" said the pale, tattooed man.
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"Where are you from?"
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It's September 21, 2001,
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10 days after the worst attack on America since World War II.
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Everyone wonders about the next plane.
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People are looking for scapegoats.
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The president, the night before, pledges to
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"bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies."
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And in the Dallas mini-mart,
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a Dallas mini-part surrounded by tire shops and strip joints
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a Bangladeshi immigrant works the register.
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Back home, Raisuddin Bhuiyan was a big man, an Air Force officer.
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But he dreamed of a fresh start in America.
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If he had to work briefly in a mini-mart to save up for I.T. classes
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and his wedding in two months, so be it.
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Then, on September 21, that tattooed man enters the mart.
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He holds a shotgun.
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Raisuddin knows the drill:
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puts cash on the counter.
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This time, the man doesn't touch the money.
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"Where are you from?" he asks.
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"Excuse me?" Raisuddin answers.
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His accent betrays him.
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The tattooed man, a self-styled true American vigilante,
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shoots Raisuddin in revenge for 9/11.
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Raisuddin feels millions of bees stinging his face.
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In fact, dozens of scalding, birdshot pellets puncture his head.
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Behind the counter, he lays in blood.
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He cups a hand over his forehead to keep in the brains
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on which he'd gambled everything.
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He recites verses from the Koran, begging his God to live.
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He senses he is dying.
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He didn't die.
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His right eye left him.
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His fiancée left him.
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His landlord, the mini-mart owner, kicked him out.
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Soon he was homeless and 60,000 dollars in medical debt,
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including a fee for dialing for an ambulance.
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But Raisuddin lived.
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And years later, he would ask what he could do to repay his God
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and become worthy of this second chance.
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He would come to believe, in fact,
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that this chance called for him to give a second chance
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to a man we might think deserved no chance at all.
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Twelve years ago, I was a fresh graduate seeking my way in the world.
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Born in Ohio to Indian immigrants,
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I settled on the ultimate rebellion against my parents,
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moving to the country they had worked so damn hard to get out of.
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What I thought might be a six-month stint in Mumbai stretched to six years.
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I became a writer and found myself amid a magical story:
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the awakening of hope across much of the so-called Third World.
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Six years ago, I returned to America and realized something:
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The American Dream was thriving,
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but only in India.
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In America, not so much.
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In fact, I observed that America was fracturing
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into two distinct societies:
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a republic of dreams and a republic of fears.
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And then, I stumbled onto this incredible tale of two lives
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and of these two Americas that brutally collided in that Dallas mini-mart.
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I knew at once I wanted to learn more,
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and eventually that I would write a book about them,
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for their story was the story of America's fracturing
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and of how it might be put back together.
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After he was shot, Raisuddin's life grew no easier.
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The day after admitting him, the hospital discharged him.
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His right eye couldn't see.
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He couldn't speak.
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Metal peppered his face.
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But he had no insurance, so they bounced him.
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His family in Bangladesh begged him, "Come home."
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But he told them he had a dream to see about.
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He found telemarketing work,
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then he became an Olive Garden waiter,
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because where better to get over his fear of white people than the Olive Garden?
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(Laughter)
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Now, as a devout Muslim, he refused alcohol,
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didn't touch the stuff.
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Then he learned that not selling it would slash his pay.
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So he reasoned, like a budding American pragmatist,
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"Well, God wouldn't want me to starve, would he?"
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And before long, in some months, Raisuddin was that Olive Garden's
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highest grossing alcohol pusher.
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He found a man who taught him database administration.
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He got part-time I.T. gigs.
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Eventually, he landed a six-figure job at a blue chip tech company in Dallas.
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But as America began to work for Raisuddin,
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he avoided the classic error of the fortunate:
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assuming you're the rule, not the exception.
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In fact, he observed that many with the fortune of being born American
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were nonetheless trapped in lives that made second chances like his impossible.
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He saw it at the Olive Garden itself,
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where so many of his colleagues had childhood horror stories
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of family dysfunction, chaos, addiction, crime.
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He'd heard a similar tale about the man who shot him
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back when he attended his trial.
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The closer Raisuddin got to the America he had coveted from afar,
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the more he realized there was another, equally real, America
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that was stingier with second chances.
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The man who shot Raisuddin grew up in that stingier America.
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From a distance, Mark Stroman was always the spark of parties,
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always making girls feel pretty.
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Always working, no matter what drugs or fights he'd had the night before.
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But he'd always wrestled with demons.
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He entered the world through the three gateways
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that doom so many young American men:
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bad parents, bad schools, bad prisons.
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His mother told him, regretfully, as a boy
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that she'd been just 50 dollars short of aborting him.
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Sometimes, that little boy would be at school,
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he'd suddenly pull a knife on his fellow classmates.
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Sometimes that same little boy would be at his grandparents',
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tenderly feeding horses.
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He was getting arrested before he shaved,
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first juvenile, then prison.
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He became a casual white supremacist
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and, like so many around him, a drug-addled and absent father.
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And then, before long, he found himself on death row,
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for in his 2001 counter-jihad, he had shot not one mini-mart clerk,
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but three.
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Only Raisuddin survived.
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Strangely, death row was the first institution
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that left Stroman better.
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His old influences quit him.
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The people entering his life were virtuous and caring:
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pastors, journalists, European pen-pals.
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They listened to him, prayed with him, helped him question himself.
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And sent him on a journey of introspection and betterment.
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He finally faced the hatred that had defined his life.
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He read Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor
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and regretted his swastika tattoos.
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He found God.
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Then one day in 2011, 10 years after his crimes,
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Stroman received news.
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One of the men he'd shot, the survivor, was fighting to save his life.
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You see, late in 2009, eight years after that shooting,
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Raisuddin had gone on his own journey, a pilgrimage to Mecca.
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Amid its crowds, he felt immense gratitude,
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but also duty.
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He recalled promising God, as he lay dying in 2001,
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that if he lived, he would serve humanity all his days.
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Then, he'd gotten busy relaying the bricks of a life.
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Now it was time to pay his debts.
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And he decided, upon reflection, that his method of payment
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would be an intervention in the cycle of vengeance
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between the Muslim and Western worlds.
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And how would he intervene?
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By forgiving Stroman publicly in the name of Islam
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and its doctrine of mercy.
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And then suing the state of Texas and its governor Rick Perry
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to prevent them from executing Stroman,
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exactly like most people shot in the face do.
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(Laughter)
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Yet Raisuddin's mercy was inspired not only by faith.
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A newly minted American citizen, he had come to believe that Stroman
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was the product of a hurting America that couldn't just be lethally injected away.
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That insight is what moved me to write my book "The True American."
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This immigrant begging America to be as merciful to a native son
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as it had been to an adopted one.
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In the mini-mart, all those years earlier,
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not just two men, but two Americas collided.
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An America that still dreams, still strives,
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still imagines that tomorrow can build on today,
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and an America that has resigned to fate,
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buckled under stress and chaos, lowered expectations,
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an ducked into the oldest of refuges:
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the tribal fellowship of one's own narrow kind.
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And it was Raisuddin, despite being a newcomer,
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despite being attacked,
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despite being homeless and traumatized,
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who belonged to that republic of dreams
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and Stroman who belonged to that other wounded country,
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despite being born with the privilege of a native white man.
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I realized these men's stories formed an urgent parable about America.
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The country I am so proud to call my own
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wasn't living through a generalized decline
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as seen in Spain or Greece, where prospects were dimming for everyone.
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America is simultaneously the most and the least successful country
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in the industrialized world.
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Launching the world's best companies,
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even as record numbers of children go hungry.
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Seeing life-expectancy drop for large groups,
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even as it polishes the world's best hospitals.
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America today is a sprightly young body,
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hit by one of those strokes that sucks the life from one side,
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while leaving the other worryingly perfect.
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On July 20, 2011, right after a sobbing Raisuddin
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testified in defense of Stroman's life,
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Stroman was killed by lethal injection by the state he so loved.
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Hours earlier, when Raisuddin still thought he could still save Stroman,
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the two men got to speak for the second time ever.
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Here is an excerpt from their phone call.
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Raisuddin: "Mark, you should know that I am praying for God,
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the most compassionate and gracious.
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I forgive you and I do not hate you.
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I never hated you."
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Stroman: "You are a remarkable person.
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Thank you from my heart.
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I love you, bro."
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Even more amazingly, after the execution,
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Raisuddin reached out to Stroman's eldest daughter, Amber,
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an ex-convinct and an addict.
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and offered his help.
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"You may have lost a father," he told her,
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"but you've gained an uncle."
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He wanted her, too, to have a second chance.
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If human history were a parade,
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America's float would be a neon shrine to second chances.
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But America, generous with second chances to the children of other lands,
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today grows miserly with first chances to the children of its own.
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America still dazzles at allowing anybody to become an American.
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But it is losing its luster at allowing every American to become a somebody.
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Over the last decade, seven million foreigners gained American citizenship.
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Remarkable.
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In the meanwhile, how many Americans gained a place in the middle class?
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Actually, the net influx was negative.
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Go back further, and it's even more striking:
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Since the 60s, the middle class has shrunk by 20 percent,
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mainly because of the people tumbling out of it.
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And my reporting around the country tells me the problem is grimmer
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than simple inequality.
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What I observe is a pair of secessions from the unifying center of American life.
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An affluent secession of up, up and away,
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into elite enclaves of the educated and into a global matrix
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of work, money and connections,
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and an impoverished secession of down and out
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into disconnected, dead-end lives
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that the fortunate scarcely see.
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And don't console yourself that you are the 99 percent.
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If you live near a Whole Foods,
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if no one in your family serves in the military,
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if you're paid by the year, not the hour,
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if most people you know finished college,
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if no one you know uses meth,
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if you married once and remain married,
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if you're not one of 65 million Americans with a criminal record --
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if any or all of these things describe you,
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then accept the possibility that actually,
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you may not know what's going on
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and you may be part of the problem.
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Other generations had to build a fresh society after slavery,
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pull through a depression, defeat fascism,
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freedom-ride in Mississippi.
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The moral challenge of my generation, I believe,
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is to reacquaint these two Americas,