Am I proud to be an American?
With American Independence Day passing last week, this has been a topic on my mind. After some thought, this is the conclusion I have come to:
I am proud to be from America. I am not proud of America.
As a child, I was proud of both. As with most children, my understanding of the world was simple, and shaped through my parents. I knew I was meant to love my country. I was taught we were the nation of the free, where any person could be who they wanted to be. I was taught that we were, as a nation, courageous, righteous, strong, and prosperous. America offered the staggering potential of the “American Dream”. We were a people who fought off tyrants to establish a land where anyone had that potential. We did so in our own revolution, and then again as an important member of the allied states in WWII.
Growing up, I enjoyed the Fourth of July and its hot dogs and rock music and fireworks. I was never particularly taken by the patriotic-American aesthetic, but I did enjoy the festivity and the sense of community that patriotism invokes. Humans, as an animal, enjoy being a part of something. People enjoy being proud of who they are–and what I was, was, undeniably, American.
As it should go, as I got older I became more educated. A good education not only informs but wisens. A good teacher, good school, and good curriculum provides facts for its students, and then teaches them how to think about those facts. It encourages questions– not only on what, where, when, and who–but also why and how?
I was privileged enough to receive an education like this. I went to a school that had social justice, community, responsibility, and lifelong learning as cornerstone tenets. I attended a small, public, charter school from Kindergarten through 8th grade called the Carbondale Community School (CCS). I love my school, and am so grateful for the opportunities of growth I had there–-such as a rich emphasis on the arts and outdoorsmanship, socratic learning, and fostering community. I had heard the word “community” so much while growing up that I more or less began drowning it out as I got older. However, the impact of being immersed in a learning environment that focuses so heavily on instilling in its students a community-forward, empathetic curiosity and lean in life left an indelible imprint on myself and those I grew up with in that school (many of whom are still my close friends).
We were offered curriculum on American aberrations, such as the slave trade and the Native American holocaust. We were often offered emotionally tricky curriculum–I remember reading accounts of the brutality of slavery in school and it being the first real introduction for me in how horrible human beings can be to one another. The capacity for humans to do evil to one another is a fact of life, and I firmly stand behind the idea that children–once they’re developmentally stable enough for it–should be exposed to difficult topics in a stable and safe environment. This not only encourages empathy and compassion, but instills in them a sense of righteousness and social justice as a response to the horrors of the world. As much as I had exposure to such realities through my schooling, there was a lot of the world that I was sheltered from that, as an adult, I wish I had been more exposed to as a child.
I had, in many ways, an absolutely idyllic childhood. I grew up in a small town in the mountains of Colorado. It was beautiful. I always remember the Carbondale of my childhood mainly consisting of four populations: old, white, hippies; true ranchers and cowboys (who would wrangle their cattle up and down the mountainsides, causing traffic jams when they would drive their cattle along the few highways in the area); middle-class white families in which the parents primarily worked either as an artisan or for a non-profit; and a tight-knit Latino community largely consisting of first-generation immigrants from Central America. Each had their own culture, and each culture wove together to create a vibrant little community, full of art, music, environmental consciousness, incense, local grass-fed beef, rodeos, excellent homemade tortillas, authentic Mexican restaurants, and, of course, an appreciation by all for the natural beauty that surrounded us.
My high school was in many ways very similar to my grade school. It offered a deeper, more mature curriculum that still emphasized an importance on the arts, outdoorsmanship, responsibility, lifelong learning, and socratic intrigue. This was a private school, and one I was more than privileged to attend with the help of academic scholarships and parental loans. It was suggested by my teachers at CCS that I attend CRMS (the Colorado Rocky Mountain School) instead of the local public high school, because they felt that I would thrive there. I was always an incredibly earnest student, and I was again fortunate enough to have many adults in my life that fostered and encouraged that in me, no matter the cost (literally).
At CRMS I took courses on World Geography taught by a teacher that was more interested in engaging us about world politics and philosophy than he was maps. I was sponsored to attend a socratic seminar at the Aspen Ideas Institute, where we delved into philosophical thought. I took courses on memoirs, glass blowing, graphic novels, world history, photography, calculus, geology, rock climbing, ceramics, and Eastern Philosophy (a course that absolutely determined the course of my life). I was rewarded by my teachers again and again for thinking critically, my earnest studiousness, and my desire to learn not only the what, but the why. We took weeklong trips into the deep wilderness of the desert and mountains twice a year, where several times we needed to engage in actual wilderness survival due to unexpected, dangerous natural phenomena (such as lightning storms atop mountains or not finding water for days in the desert).
Am I proud to be a Carbondalian, raised by hippies and artisans and ranchers? Absolutely. Am I proud to be an alum of the Carbondale Community School, where I was taught to constantly strive for better for myself and the world? Undeniably. Am I proud to be an Oyster (the actual, literal, mascot of CRMS is the Rocky Mountain Oysters, this is not a joke), where I gained skills in research, survival, and artisanship? No doubt. Am I proud to be a Coloradan, and thus skilled in skiing and climbing? Of course.
Am I also aware that all of the opportunities and privileges offered to me in my life are largely due to my childhood home being in America? That the freedom of thought expressed and encouraged by my educators growing up was guaranteed to all of us by the freedom of speech? That as a young girl I was encouraged to do many things–go to school, play sports, engage in dangerous outdoor activities–that in many places in the world is just simply not available to most young girls? Yes.
Did the wonders of my upbringing also happen against the backdrop of The War on Terrorism, a recession triggered by a few greedy people, school shootings, the increasing pressure of climate change (again fostered by a few greedy people), and systemic racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, homophobia, and misogyny? Yes.
As progressive as my schools were, I realized (and keep realizing) as I got older, there were some major gaps in my education. A lot of this was due, largely, to my environment. It is hard to teach about the extant systems that ensure the second-class citizenship of many marginal communities in America when you do not exist among them. I could see the horror of Islamophobia and the domestic terrorists that would shoot up Mosques and Sikh temples (in their ignorance not even realizing the difference) in the news–but I do not think I knew any Muslim people. I could study the horrors of the hundreds of years of history of slavery in America and be rightly appalled, but I had never been to the South and did not feel how that history still lives there. I was, for the most part, even unaware of the police killing of black youths such as Tamir Rice–but even if I had, I don’t know how much I really would have understood the full-scale implications of such murders, as I didn’t really know that many black people. I knew that we shouldn’t have been at war in Iraq because that was what the adults around me would say–but couldn’t really comprehend the reality of the sheer amount of destruction and death wrought by the US in that land and against those people–and the history that led to the US being its own harbinger of war in that region.
Most of my revelations about the cruel, dark, history of the US I came to as an adult.
In college I learned why Teddy Roosevelt built the Panama Canal–it was not just a gift for the people of the Central American nation (as it had previously, to me, been alluded to be), but a piece in his campaign to establish an American empire. The fact that there was a large American Empire was something I had never even realized. To then further realize that there still is an American Empire is yet another matter. I grew up knowing that America was proudly founded as an antithesis to the inhumanity of colonial rule. It is then wild to realize the twisted reality that the American “territories”, such as Puerto Rico, Guam, and the American Samoa (to name a few) are themselves essentially colonies of an American Empire, all being “American” without representation (you know, the very notion that got our founding fathers so pissed they caused a revolution over it).
It wasn’t until college that I had learned that the Philippines had, at one point, “belonged” to America, at the cost of 100,000s of lives. The massacre in the Philippines when we “won” it from the Spanish was all so that, of course, it was easier for the US to colonize and usurp Hawaii from the native people there, who largely did not have interest in being Americans (many still don’t–I can tell you from my short time living there, there is still an active resistance).
It is wild to realize how many elements of America, even with my education that encouraged deeper thought and analysis, I took for granted, and never looked at twice. It’s disconcerting to realize that just as you learn how propaganda was–and is–used by nations throughout history, it had been used on me, and everyone I know, to accept the excellence of America. We were taught that America is excellent because of Capitalism–that it is the best economic system, and any other economic system is actually, maybe, evil?
Of course, we were never supposed to pay heed to all of the attempts at socialism that happened in South America that were directly undone by CIA intervention–that the US systematically, again and again, removed popular, elected leaders and replaced them with US-backed despotic tyrants that promised to appease American interests. Americans are not supposed to look at why the Middle East is constantly in turmoil. That, of course, also has nothing to do with American espionage and government agencies very consciously supporting violent regimes or insurgent groups that promised to appeal to American interests. We were to only feel that we are the saviors of these poor brown people who cannot fend for themselves, that they needed a white man to step in to give them freedom (as we hold a gun to their backs, stymying any attempt at grassroots, independent efforts at democracy or autonomy). We could look at how poorly Sharia Law dictators in power in Islamic countries treat their minorities (don’t worry about how they came into power)–just don’t look at how America treats its own minorities.
It was wild to wake up to the reality that, subliminally, I had been taught that to be white in America is the norm, and anything else is recognized as “other” (how many people do you know who truly identify as “European American”, in the way that people do “African American” or “Asian American”–or even “Native American”? It’s telling how bizarre that is to even consider). To be straight is normal, to be middle-class is normal, to be Christian is normal. Anything else is, of course, allowed in the land of the “free”, but it must be identified as other, and the extent to which it is allowed needs to be constantly questioned.
It became more and more evident that America was not, in fact, a land where everyone was free, as I had believed in my youth. There are ways in which we are close to that ideal state of freedom, but then have freedoms either threatened or taken away. Women in many states now do not have control over their own bodies. Trans people in most places do not have control over their own bodies. There are a walloping 2 million people incarcerated in America (580 out of every 100,000 Americans are incarcerated, more than any other developed nation). Although gay and lesbian couples are allowed to marry now, they weren’t for most of my childhood. Today, people are being kidnapped by masked men and thrown into unmarked vans simply for being Latino in America.
I had touched on my awakening to my white privilege in a previous post, and won’t dive into it too deeply again here. I will only readdress the realization I had then, that in the hiphop and rap music I would listen to, the artists would be literally shouting about the condition of minorities in America and their continuous struggle to exist under systemic oppression–and I would not absorb it at all. Or, even, for that matter, how I would listen to Green Day’s “American Idiot” album on repeat and then think nothing of the messaging behind the lyrics (the emotion of emo punk was what was primarily engaging to thirteen-year-old me).
I think I had thought that we fixed it? You know, we fixed racism in America. Martin Luther King Jr. came along and made it all better (again, don’t think about how he died, or who killed him, or why). Yesterday I finished The New Jim Crow–a little late to the party, I know, but later is better than never–and man, I just wish that every American were to read it as a matter of understanding American history. Reading it just deepens my sadness and frustration that there is a loud group of people shaping education and politics in America now that don’t want black history or stories told–or really any American history taught that challenges the eminence of white Christian America and its supposed “excellence”. Again, as someone who had been actively taught critical thinking skills and had been, to some extent, exposed to challenging American history, I still was frighteningly ignorant. To have any and all of that actually stripped from the curriculum of most young people in America–it is daunting to think about what that will do to their minds.
It is a little difficult to touch on contemporary American politics and the history that is currently being made. As everyone knows, it’s a lot. It’s so disappointing, frustrating, and overwhelming. To say that I am most certainly, unequivocally, not proud of the American government right now is an understatement. It is an embarrassment, globally. I think any MAGA-folk would be hard-pressed to find people elsewhere in the world who think America is that great right now. So far, in our travels around Europe, we have only met one man who thought that Trump was the better outcome in the election than Harris (he was a very sweet Italian waiter who told us that “All Italians love Trump because he will end the war in Ukraine”…I wonder how they feel about that now).
A few nights ago we were hanging out at the idyllic Hafen here in Greifswald. The Hafen (hafen is German for “harbor”) is one of the staples of life here. It rests on the River Ryck, which connects the town to the Baltic Sea a few miles away. The Hafen consists of charming food boats (like a food truck, but you know, floating on the water) and shacks where they sell beer and cocktails. You sit where you please and enjoy your snacks and beer, looking out over the boats, the river, and the little city with its two cathedrals that dominate the skyline. The group we were with was comprised of Michael’s work colleagues, and I was struck by how everyone was a different nationality within the group (excepting Michael and me from each other, of course). There was a person each from Ireland, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, and Thailand. That night we ended up slipping into conversation about American politics (it is entirely possible I brought it up, because I spend a great amount of time thinking about it). It seems that American politics is a topic that not only everyone here is interested in, but also that they are well informed on.
I think that, in general, Europeans are much better than Americans at being aware of the news in other parts of the world…but also there is no denying that our reality TV star of a President knows how to create an all-absorbing drama. The question we got asked that night at the Hafen is the one most commonly asked to us by Europeans who want to talk to us about American politics: “Why is America so crazy right now?” The Europeans often express that to them, from the outside, the chaos in America seems insane. Clearly, there are also a lot of European countries themselves flirting with fascism again. The UK has made it illegal to be Pro-Palestine in any way. Italy has a far-right Prime Minister. Germany has the AFD party, itself basically an ugly resurgence of Nazism that had been worming around hidden for years. But nowhere is as INSANE as the US right now.
People here will ask about the national guard confrontations in California and about ICE; they ask about the deportations and the construction of the concentration camp in Florida; they ask about the billionaires and how instead of their being opposition to their gross accumulation of wealth at the cost of the rest of the country, there is actually government support for this atrocity. Nowhere in their questions is there any hint that they think Trump is doing anything but the opposite of “making America great again”. He’s an international fascination, for sure. But I think most people feel concern for us, and not awe or envy. I have had a couple of Europeans express that they do not even wish to travel to the US right now–it’s too scary a concept for them. These were white, educated, men. I can only imagine the discomfort of anyone with any sort of identity labeled as a “minority” feeling.
Germany is a socialist country. To many Americans, “socialism” is a dirty, scary word. They’ve been taught that it necessarily means fascism. There have been times, in history, absolutely, when fascism was wrought on a nation under the guise of “socialism” (Nazi Germany being a notable example). However, it seems to me that an economic system is largely like a religion–you can practice it in healthy ways as long as you don’t become a dogmatic fundamentalist about it. Anything taken to the extreme becomes unhealthy, toxic, and scary. I would say that in America today there is a dogmatic fundamentalism around capitalism that has been leaning towards fascism for decades (since Reagan, most acutely), and is only becoming more so under MAGA America.
Living in socialist Germany is rather pleasant. There is, absolutely, less of an emphasis on individual gain. It just seems that most people are genuinely disinterested in accumulating wealth. There is a lot more contentment with having simply enough. Once can still participate in capitalism, of course–I think you’d be hard-pressed in the world to find anywhere that doesn’t engage in some level of capitalism, especially if it is a developed nation. There are shopping centers, supermarkets, ads on YouTube videos, billboards, McDonalds, and Amazon. There just is less of an emphasis on all of it. There is less pressure to spend money–and the money you do have, goes farther (at least out here–I do think German cities are more expensive).
The Germans have a disdain for credit. They have their own credit system here that is, as far as I can tell, actually based on how little debt you’ve had. They don’t have interest in debt you’ve taken on and then paid off. They’d rather you didn’t try to live above your means. Why would you? Hospital visits are free. Public transit is easy (as is walking and biking). Groceries are more affordable. Childcare is free. Higher education is basically free. Everyone is supported well by the taxes they all pay into (what an idea).
I think there is a legitimate reason to be afraid of the idea of socialism in America. It is less likely to work there than here. This is evident already–just look at how the taxes that Americans pay now don’t go too far to actually improve their lives. America has crumbling roads, dilapidated schools with underpaid teachers, many people suffering from treatable illnesses without healthcare, homeless families, etc. In order for socialism to work in America, there would need to be a drastic reduction in the dogmatic fundamentalism of individualism.
Americans are raised to prioritize themselves and their families over everything else. This is the backbone of the American Dream–you can be and do anything, it’s just up to you–and, if you do make it, you better make sure no one else comes to take what’s yours. This is why so much of American taxes go towards enabling the wealthy and funding wars instead of caring for its people. Wars not only line the pockets of weapons manufacturors, but also protect selfish American interests. The wealthy do not want to share what they have so they pay off politicians so that they don’t pay any taxes. Meanwhile, investing in schools, childcare, elderly care, veteran care, healthcare–that all would mean caring for people that are not you or your own. It doesn’t support the idea of rugged individualism, to have everyone helping to take care of everyone.
When our German acquaintance the other night asked us that increasingly common question of “why is America so crazy right now?”, Michael and I were able to give a few answers. The emphasis on individualism is one of the reasons. Another clear reason is the blatant corruption in politics enabled by Citizens United–having corporations legally allowed to bribe politicians is insane, clearly unethical, and it is undoubtedly the main reason why politicians so often prioritize corporate interests (including those of the NRA, Lockheed Martin, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Monsanto, privatized prisons, etc, etc) over the interests of America’s people and environment. A third reason is the dichotomy between the news that those who are liberal have access to versus the news that those on the right have access to. It is not uncommon in recent difficult conversations with conservative loved ones that it becomes clear that they think we are misinformed due to our news outlets, and vice versa. It makes genuine dialog near impossible because we are working on the premise of opposing realities. As far as I know, none of these factors are eminent forces in Germany.
America does offer something rich: potential. That is its siren’s call. The stories of people who started out with little, then cracked the code and made it big. This is what not only calls immigrants to America, but keeps American citizens complicit within this system that clearly does not serve them. The promise of potential is what is inspiring about the story of America’s founding, and is what continues to inspire, genuinely, Americans today. I do think, though, that what we as a people are aiming for with our hopes and aspirations needs to shift. If, as a society, we aspired towards the pursuit of happiness for all, versus me, we would actually go farther as a nation and a people. It is not a sustainable dream for everyone to become billionaires. That is in and of itself a faulty aspiration, and an amoral one. It is wishing to become the dragon, and not the knight.
There is a lot that I love about America. I love that it is a messy tapestry of cultures formed from the peoples from all over the world that sought it for its promise of potential. I love the astounding natural beauty–the mountains, oceans, prairies, deserts, forests, swamps. I love the heart of the people evident in the myriad protests springing up, and in the way that many people are opting to care for their immigrant neighbors over their own safety. I love the land that forged the people I love most in the world–my family, my friends, myself.
I love that it has this insane, innate, potential for greatness, if we can wrest it back from the draconic hands of the current oligarchy running it into the ground from all three branches of government. If we actually, truly (perhaps for the first time in history), choose to fully run our government under the premise of equality and liberty for all, then there truly would be a greatness to America. I ardently hope that we can earnestly become a land of the free, where no one lives feeling less than because they are not white, Christian, straight, cisgendered, and wealthy. Where everyone is supported to live just enough so that they and their communities may flourish. Where there is a genuine interest in repairing harm to those who have been historically disenfranchised, simply because it is the right thing to do. Where the interest in the community that was so embedded into me in my youth is felt and practiced by all. Where everyone cares about a healthy environment, deep and nourishing (even if difficult) education for all, healthy food and access to medicine for all, a place where people are truly free to love and be who they want, and a life where we actually treat others how we wish to be treated.
If Americans were to live for the benefit of all beings, so that all may be happy and live in safety, then there would be every reason to be proud. Until then, I will remain critical and active against the current regime. Not because I am not proud to be American, but because I want to be.
Reading now: A Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich and The Well of Ascension by my boi Brandon Sanderson
Listening now: Jesse Welles. He writes captivating folk music that perfectly captures current issues, like a contemporary Bob Dylan.