When I studied in Scotland during my junior year of college, I befriended this girl named Freya. She was from Bristol and when I asked what living there was like, she told me to watch this TV show “This Country,” if I wanted to understand. We sat down to watch the first few episodes together and it was funny, but it wasn’t as funny to me as it was to her, which was understandable, because I wasn’t from Bristol.
America is my home. Nowhere else ever could be, because even if I learned their language and bought their clothes, my memories would not be set in their classrooms and on their roads. I couldn’t see my aunts and uncles in the strangers I pass on the street. My grasp on personality, on social nuance, on food, culture, and politics, would forever be loosened.
For some, place is a delicate object to hold gently in an open palm. They’re happy to make a home in the easy beauty of a foreign land, where they are not responsible for maintence or management. I do not view a home as a backdrop, or as something outside of myself. If I am ivy, home is the wall giving me form. I am who I am because I’m American.
I am not proud of my country. America is young and arrogant and incredibly selfish. They’ve got us all running around, working too much and consuming too much, too distracted and tired to fix the rusted systems in place. For fear of sounding trite, I won’t list off the Great American Problems, but we’re fucked and most of us know it. I wish I was born in an older, wiser place, but I wasn’t, I was born here, and these Great American Problems are, in part, mine.
Part of me thinks it would be a lot easier if it all dissolved tomorrow. But if it did dissolve tomorrow, I would want to spend today loving the place that made me.
AMERICA, THERE IS NOWHERE LIKE YOU!!!
I love the vastness and the silent roads in the middle of nowhere.
I love country music in the summer.
I love baseball games and hot dogs.
I love gymnasiums decorated for homecoming dances.
I love apple pie with ice cream.
I love mountains and valleys and waterfalls.
I love the dream of it all!