Today, we decided to have a celebration of the things we love about the U.S., in protest of the conventional patriotism represented by the mass-celebration of the Fourth. The idea was to gather and reflect on aspects of the US that we hoped were different, and also give some concrete examples of the good about our home nation.
I didn't know that this process would be as powerful for me as it ended up being. Let me give some background on what I've been thinking about in these last few weeks regarding the US. When I make a significant change in my life- geographically, relationally, educationally... I have the tendency to reject where I've come from. As I try to adapt to the new situation I find myself in, I compare it to where I'm coming from, and it usually comes out as much more positive. This is incredibly easy to do when I'm leaving the US. All the sudden, as I watch people playing futbol in the park, gather for large family celebrations, eat traditional foods, listen to folkloric music, travel to beautiful natural wonders, and learn about cultural heritage, I find myself selectively remembering and criticizing the US. We are nothing more than fast food, the war on terror, commercial rap music, SUVs, and suburbia. We have no cultural heritage. We are the privileged, the guilty ones, the consumers, the exploiters. I enter this mood of repentance, emptiness and guilt. I feel like I have nothing to contribute because my background is nothing compared to the rich context I find myself in.
Today was a fascinating switch on the whole paradigm I've described above. Simply changing my thought process to think about both the terrible and inspiring things about the US, at the same time, was quite revelatory. There are awful things about the US. Our foreign policy is a disaster, designed to use the rhetoric of terror to justify a world-wide imperial search for resources. The institutionalized racism of the prison system, the education system, and the cultural narrative of success; the unchallenged myth of endless economic growth; the exportation of democracy through the military; the incredible destruction of the land we live on by the industrial food system... these are the aspects I keep at the front of my mind. They are true, and they are powerful. There is a system designed to preserve power as it is, to protect the status quo, in place in the US. This is obvious to me.
What is harder for me to talk about, at first, is the humanizing current that runs beside this complex and destructive structure. There is an expressive, beautiful, protesting, living river of people that is always pushing against the framework of power... and this is where I've grown, loved, and found inspiration. This is what I discovered today: that I love the poetry of the US, from modern spoken word artists Andrea Gibson and Anis Mojgani to Wendell Berry and Walt Whitman. I love the political fiction, from John Steinbeck to George Orwell. I listen to Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and the beautiful folk that follows in their footsteps, seeking inspiration outside of the American dream. In the US, I have found movements for immigrant rights, protests against the School of Americas, people who bike as their primary transportation, school-garden teachers, backyard gardens, pacifist theology, multicultural communities and families, gatherings of Muslims, Jews and Christians concerned about the violence in Israel/Palestine, rainbow stickers, the Shenandoah Valley, bluegrass music.... There is so much more.
What I am gathering from this process of celebrating the good in the US is a powerful sense of pride and love, but not in the US exclusively or as a superior state. It is in, rather, the beautiful, expressive, loving, and human current that runs in contrast to the terrible, destructive, power-hungry system. This is everywhere. This is in the US, in Colombia, in Sudan and Pittsburgh and in every family and community and, indeed, in you and I. There is an attempt at balance, an equilibrium. This by no means forgives or erases the responsibility for the terrible things we have done and are capable of. However, it is impossible to throw out anything as wholly evil, because as we try, we discover that we have gathered goodness from the same thing we are criticizing. I have grown up in the US. It is my nation, but what I am learning from it is not to praise it over any other, but to recognize the lesson it is teaching me.
Life is both beauty and ugliness, all wrapped up together. It is both lament and celebration, and I, at least, have grown by experiencing both. For this, I have to thank my home country.
well said.
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