E Pluribus Unum, in One Body
ARTICLES/ESSAYS
E Pluribus Unum, in One Body
0By Martin Robert Genter Jr.
The first time I watched Robert F. Kennedy’s speech on the night Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, I was alone in a small Detroit apartment, broke, depressed, and half-convinced I’d already wasted my life.
I knew the history: the riots, the flames, the cities tearing themselves apart. What I didn’t know was how a single man, standing on a flatbed truck in Indianapolis, could keep one city calm while the rest of America burned.
He did it by reaching backward.
He told that crowd that even in our sleep, pain that won’t go away falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, against our will, wisdom comes. He was quoting Aeschylus, through a book his sister-in-law Jackie had given him after his brother’s murder: The Greek Way, by Edith Hamilton.
In his worst night, he turned to the Greeks. In mine, I did too.
Falling out of the story I thought I was in
On paper, my life was supposed to be straight upward.
I had a full-ride to law school. I’d won one of two congressional internships in the state. I later won a Democratic state senate primary in Michigan with 70% of the vote. I studied at Ole Miss, Dartmouth, and GWU. My mentors worked in Congress and the UN. I thought the path was clear: law, politics, influence.
Then I lost almost all of it.
At Ole Miss Law, I skipped a final exam because I was working on a United Nations fellowship project—grant proposals to fight poverty and rape in Africa. I took that work more seriously than the exam. The zero on that final cost me my scholarship and my place.
Later, at Dartmouth, I used a UN report I’d written years before as part of a paper and was kicked out for self-plagiarism. No one cared that I’d authored it the first time. I violated the rule.
The institutions that were supposed to stamp me as “promising” instead spit me out. Friends in Mississippi politics stopped responding after I switched parties. Old fraternity brothers who once called me family unfollowed and disappeared when I posted a photo of my white father and Black mother together, and said publicly what I believed.
So I did what a lot of broken, stubborn people do: I went underground.
Ten years with the dead
The honest truth is that I spent most of the last decade in isolation and depression.
Weeks went by where I barely spoke to another living person. I gained weight. I vaped and drank more than I should. I stopped recognizing myself in the mirror.
But I read.
I walked for hours with audiobooks, pacing the same blocks. I lay in bed with a candle lit, listening to Edith Hamilton, Grant’s memoirs, Camus’ essays, Kennedy’s speeches. “Books were the only thing that felt real to me.” I abused prescription stimulants at times, not to party, but to force my distracted mind through one more chapter.
By conservative count, I’ve gone through hundreds and hundreds of serious nonfiction books—history, tragedy, philosophy, theology, politics, classical literature. Every one of them was an attempt to answer the same question: How do I make sense of my life and my country in a time when everything feels like it’s coming apart?
Over time, something strange happened.
I started to feel closer to the dead than the living. Ulysses S. Grant’s doubts felt like my own. Emerson, Hamilton, and RFK stopped being names on covers and became voices I knew by tone. When I say “the dead speak to me,” I don’t mean it in some mystical way. I mean: on nights when I didn’t want to wake up the next morning, it was their words that kept me moving.
And somewhere in there, I realized that my life—the mess of it—is exactly the kind of life the Greeks were trying to teach us how to face.
E pluribus unum, in one very specific body
My first tattoo, when I turned 18, says: “Patriot Cowboy – The American Way.”
I grew up a rodeo kid and a hunter. I love country music. I know the feel of a bull under me and a rifle in my hands. At the same time, I can’t stand needless suffering—animal or human. I used to say a prayer over a deer. Now I can barely imagine pulling the trigger. Those contradictions used to confuse me. Now I see them as a map.
My blood is an argument.
On my father’s side, I can trace our line back to the Plantagenet kings of England, to Charlemagne, to Magna Carta barons. My family is registered as one of Michigan’s “first families.” My white ancestors fought in the American Revolution. My white grandfather fought in World War II. My white father served in Iraq.
On my mother’s side, my ancestors came here in chains. My Black grandfather fought at Hamburger Hill and came home to segregation and slurs. For most of American history, my parents’ marriage would have been illegal in many states. A kid like me would have been considered not just unwanted, but an offense against the order of things.
So when people ask me where I stand, I have to tell them the truth: I am E Pluribus Unum, in one body.
In me, the slave and the slaveholder, the king and the peasant, the patriot and the oppressed all sit at the same table. I’ve been beaten bloody by a Black football player who thought I was an ignorant white frat boy. I’ve been threatened by white fraternity brothers who said they’d “beat my Black ass” when they found out I wasn’t just white.
I’ve sat at dinner with conservative white veterans, talking about honor and service, and I’ve sat in Detroit living rooms with Black pastors who marched for civil rights, talking about justice and survival.
When your existence crosses that many lines, you don’t get the luxury of simple stories. You can’t say “my people” and mean only one side. If I retreat into bitterness, I erase half my family. If I pretend the sins of this country don’t matter, I erase the other half.
So I’ve had to do something harder: build my identity on values, not tribes.
Losing one faith and finding another
I was raised Christian. Church wasn’t a costume for us; it was real. But the more I read and the more I watched the world, the harder it became to square the doctrines I’d been handed with what I knew in my gut about justice.
One night, around three in the morning, after watching videos of children in Africa starving to death for lack of a five-dollar shot, I called my stepfather—a Black pastor in Detroit—and told him what I couldn’t unsee.
If the universe is set up so that children born in the wrong place not only suffer every day of their short lives, but then supposedly get tortured forever because they never heard the right name for God—that’s not justice. I told him, honestly, “If that’s how it works, I would rather go to hell with those kids than stand in heaven pretending it’s okay.”
That conversation ended one kind of faith for me. It didn’t end my need for meaning.
What it did was push me toward a different kind of religion: one where the test of what you believe isn’t what you say on Sunday, but whether you reduce suffering on Monday.
When I look at Jesus, Muhammad, the Buddha, the Hebrew prophets, Socrates, or the tragic poets, they have one thing in common: they stare suffering in the face, they side with the vulnerable, and they tell the truth to power even when it kills them.
If everyone who claimed those names took that seriously, we could end extreme poverty. We already have the tools. What we lack is will—and examples.
We are living in an age of tragedy
Edith Hamilton argued there have only been two true “ages of tragedy”: Athens in the 5th century BCE and England under Elizabeth I. Those ages were not dark backwaters; they were Golden Ages of art, war, discovery, and self-confidence—exactly the conditions in which tragedy, the honest kind, becomes possible.
Today, our age is more “golden” and more dangerous than either.
We hold phones with more power than NASA had when it sent men to the moon. We have AI systems that can draft constitutions, design molecules, and manipulate markets. We have nuclear weapons that can end cities. We have the capacity to end extreme poverty, to extend human life, to explore other planets.
We also have mass loneliness, spiraling anxiety, collapsing trust in institutions, and political tribes that would rather watch their country burn than see their rivals succeed.
The old anchors—church, party, community, shared media—are eroding. As Nietzsche warned, we unchained the earth from its sun. As Jung said, a mood of destruction and renewal hangs over everything.
That’s what tragedy feels like when you’re in it.
A tragic age is one in which the stakes are ultimate: we either grow up, morally and spiritually, or we destroy ourselves. It’s the crest of a wave where you can’t stand still. You either fall or you ride it.
Fire in our hands
When ChatGPT and other AI tools first showed up, I was devastated.
I had spent my whole life reading to become the kind of writer and thinker who could stand in the tradition of Emerson, Nietzsche, and Kennedy—someone whose words might move a country a few inches closer to justice. Then suddenly, a machine could produce clean, persuasive prose in seconds.
It felt like the one gift I had was no longer needed.
Then I remembered Prometheus.
Fire is only a weapon if you leave it to the gods—or the corporations. In human hands, with conscience and courage, it becomes a tool for warmth, light, and healing.
So instead of walking away, I forced myself to learn AI deeply. I use it now like a blacksmith uses a forge: to shape, refine, and multiply the impact of the ideas I’ve bled for. To plan campaigns that reduce suffering. To help others find words for what they feel. To think more clearly about the dangers ahead.
We will not put this fire back in the box. The question is whether we will have the tragic wisdom to wield it without burning down everything we love.
What I’m trying to do with my life
I’m not writing any of this because I think I’m better than the people I admire. I’m writing it because I know, in my bones, that hiding from what I’m called to do is its own kind of cowardice.
My name is Martin Robert for a reason: I grew up seeing myself in Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy—not in their achievements, but in their willingness to suffer for a vision of justice and reconciliation. I have no illusions that I am them. But I refuse to pretend their unfinished work doesn’t land on my generation.
Here’s what that means for me:
I want to be a tragedian for our age – someone who can take the wisdom of the Greeks and make it burn in the hearts of Americans again.
I want to help build a new American myth – one honest about slavery, genocide, and greed, and equally honest about courage, sacrifice, and repair.
I want us to use AI like Promethean fire – to reduce the number of tortured children, to ease loneliness, to strengthen democracy and human dignity.
I want to live in such a way that, even if everything I build disappears, I can say my life was a small, fair price to pay to make the world a little less cruel.
I spent ten years in the dark with the dead. Now I’m stepping back into the light with what they gave me.
If you’ve ever felt like your life sits on a fault line—between races, classes, parties, faiths; between hope and despair—then you understand what I mean when I say: E Pluribus Unum is not just a motto. It’s a demand.
It’s asking each of us: What will you do with the pieces of the world that live inside you? Will you use them to tear yourself apart—or to help hold a broken country together?
That answer, more than any algorithm or election, will decide whether this tragic age becomes a second Renaissance or our final dark age.
The Greeks would say the gods are watching. I would say our children are.
Either way, history is going to remember what we chose.5
