America - A Patriotic Primer

I was putting the children’s books away when one in particular caught my eye. America, the title proudly read, and beneath: “A Patriotic Primer”. I flipped through the pages, suddenly wondering, and found myself swallowing hard. Within those pages I found an America I had almost forgotten.

There was a time when I was proud to be an American. I was very young then and my pride was born from ignorance. America tasted of Hawaiian Punch and hot dogs and hamburgers, for I had never tasted anything richer. America smelled of fireworks and fresh cut grass and gasoline, for I had never smelled anything fairer. America felt like red, white, and blue, proud and strong and free, for I had never known a culture tied together with anything stronger than the colours of a flag, or a loose commitment to ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’.

I was content then, sheltered within our constructed culture, unaware that my world was built from the fading pieces of a thousand other worlds. The Irish were to be laughed at; they were funny and irritable, prone to drunkenness, pitiably obsessed with corned beef and their green shamrocks. The English were to be remembered as our forefathers but treated as weaker brothers who clung to old-fashioned words and little white cottages. The Germans wore lederhosen and were fond of yodelling, the Italians sang Opera and ate too much spaghetti. South America was filled with brightly coloured parrots and vibrant green, Africa was hungry and hot. The Chinese worked hard to bring us Happy Meal Toys and tennis shoes, the Japanese to bring us video games and paper cranes, the Mexicans to sing to us and wear sombreros, to serve us salsa and chile con queso.

Then there was America the Great, America the Beautiful. She stood before the other nations of the world as a statue carved from cool white marble, flawless and strong. How happy I was to have grown up beneath her hand. I listened to her stories and I was proud. I knew that it was America who liberated Europe from the Germans in World War II, America who tore down the iron curtain, America whom the world looked to for justice. I forgot that it was also America who interned 110,000 of it’s own innocent citizens in Japanese “War Relocation Centers”, America who gives not even half the Earth Summits target of foreign aid, America who, along with Australia, is one of only two developed countries who have refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

On September 11^th, 2001, a terrorist attack directed at the heart of New York City killed nearly three thousand American citizens. In the blood and smoke and ash that poured from every newspaper, radio, and new station in those days, I began to see a different sort of truth. It was a hard and bitter truth, but it was painted in letters that could not be denied. There was evil in this world, and it was all around us. I saw the incredible injustice and barbarity that caused the September 11^th tragedy, but I also saw the hatred behind it. And I saw how America harnessed it’s pain, how it grimly went forward with tanks and bombs and guns. I even saw my friend crying for the people, the innocent people of Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond, who now had to face the terrible wrath of the most powerful country on earth.

Never again could I see America as I had once seen it. Never again could it shine for me with clear and brilliant light, leading the world with its rippling red, white, and blue. No, the flawless American effigy had been decisively cracked, and wind and water did the rest. Gently, by degrees, I turned away. It wasn’t that America was wretched, no; all countries are wretched, for greed and cruelty are common threads of humanity. America betrayed me with its hypocrisy, with its single-minded amour propre, with its blind and shallow patriotism.

I began to look beyond our borders, beyond our own way of life. I have tea with Mrs. Hirayoshi and she teaches me Origami and Kimono and lets me try seaweed and squid and the strange, green Japanese pumpkin. I attend an Arabic Baptist Church with my next door neighbours, and listen to the languages of our ‘enemies’, who use the same words we do: smile, love, speak, play nice with your sisters… A friend in Milan sends me a letter she wrote sitting beside an ancient ruin, her writing gentle and musical, as Italian cannot help but be. On an Internet connection that spans four thousand miles, through my pen pal Liisa’s window, I watch the midnight sun sink in the Finnish sky, hover for a moment, and slowly begin to rise again.

I turn away and I find my own white walls, a pot-roast dinner, cookie-cutter houses laid out in neat suburban rows: a culture that clings to the fading ideals of its glory days. At times I believe that I have been born into this lifestyle so that I could appreciate other lifestyles, that my culture is weak so that I can enjoy all the cultures of the world. I realize that our culture is a new one, still growing and richening, that to bring three hundred million people together as a nation where there was nothing only a few hundred years ago is something that takes time. At other times I am less optimistic. I think only of leaving, of deserting the pale life I lead here, sheltered and separated from all other people and nations. I want to live inside the world.

But where should I go? I am not Scottish, Irish, English, French, Canadian, or Native - I am a mix of all of these, as artificially constructed as my country. I am American, and I cannot deny it. Then I remember. There’s a particularly American phrase that’s been going around recently. “If you don’t like our country,” some self-avowed patriots will tell you, “then leave.” What madness. Have they forgotten that the only road to progress is through continually moving forward? Would they have said the same to the Suffragettes or to the Civil Rights activists of the centuries past? It’s words like these that can uproot an empire, and our own empire is rooted shallowly indeed.

America: A Patriotic Primer. On the very last page is a group of children, leading a little parade. Stripped bare of any real identity, dressed in plain t-shirts, the only clue as to these children’s identities rests in the insignificant details: their hair, the angle of their eyes, the shades of their skin. Their faces are crudely painted in the style of the Native Americans their own nation chased into reservations, in colours anyone could guess at. Their precious red, white, and blue look crisp and strong from a distance, but I know how watery those paints are. With a little rain, they’ll wash off completely.

I am proud to be an American. I am proud to have overcome some of the global selfishness I have inherited from it, I am grateful for the shallow roots it gives me, and I am even pleased with the material things that it makes available for me. I am privileged in this world, and I admit, I will be sad to leave my lovely suburban house, my cabin by the lake, my little red SUV, and the other signs of my growing materialism. But I don’t like our country, and if that’s the way they feel about it… I’ll leave. Because at the end of every day, when the lights go out and I lay alone and think of what I have become, there’s one thing I’m sure of.

Ego Non Habeo Patriam – I have no homeland.