definition: American

The Spectacle

I read a New Yorker article the other week that discussed how the Bubonic Plague led to the radical thinking of the Renaissance. Isolation and suffering opened people’s minds and allowed them to think in new ways. At the beginning of lockdown, I thought that like the Bubonic Plague, perhaps some of our generations greatest thinking would emerge from being nestled in our homes with nothing better to do than write the next great American novel.

Instead of opening our minds, though, the pandemic, at least in this country, has only further ingrained a destructive mindset. “What I see right now,” one of the public health experts wrote in the New Yorker article, “. . . is that the pandemic has not led to new creative thinking but, on the contrary, has strengthened all the worse, most stereotypical, and irrational ways of thinking.”

People who believed in science will continue to listen to the recommendations and wear masks, and people who don’t will continue to believe what they want to believe for their own convenience. I – along with so many others – am sickened that we have turned the safety measures of this time into a political statement. If you wear a mask you are a Democrat. If you don’t, you’re a Trump loving Republican. If you want schools to open, you are a Republican who doesn’t care about the lives of others. If you want schools to remain virtual you are a human loving Democrat. (I, by the way, stand firmly for schools reopening. But that’s a post for another time.)

As we get further into this crisis, though, opinions aren’t drawn as clearly as political lines. Within my own family we have deeply varying views on how we should rearrange our lives to accommodate this pandemic. My brother, who is also my roommate, is of the belief that we shouldn’t let anything dictate our life choices. He has continued to work and travel in much the same way he did before COVID ever hit. Every weekend he is camping in another small Colorado town with another group of friends. He has traveled to San Diego to visit a friend and just booked a ticket to Florida to see a different friend.

His behaviors have sparked more than a few arguments between the two of us. We both wear masks. We both believe that this pandemic has revealed the deep fault lines within our society. And yet our priorities are different. My priority is to do what’s best for my community’s health and my family’s health. Pierce’s priority is to live his life as close to normal as possible.  

Despite our behaviors, despite the disastrous way our administration has handled this pandemic, despite the blame they have off loaded to China and the lack of leadership that has led to unsafe working conditions and continued school closures, despite all that, I believe that we still have the opportunity to turn this around. To learn from this. To create infrastructures that close the wealth gap and fix the disparities in healthcare.

That opportunity is the election.

My boyfriend and I were out on my back porch a few weeks ago, eating bratwurst and chips when somehow the conversation swerved to voting. He hadn’t voted in the last election, he told me, and he wasn’t planning on voting in this election either.

“I just don’t like either candidate,” he said as justification.  

I argued that he was either entirely apathetic or incredibly privileged if he couldn’t find just one thing that made a candidate seem better than the other.

“How has Trump being in office changed your life?” he asked as a counter argument.

I sighed. So many ways. How could I explain this and not come across as a jaded feminist?

“As a woman,” I started, “I feel constantly threatened. Any day my access to birth control could be taken away. There are already restrictions around it.” I cited the recent exemption passed that would allow health insurance companies to no longer cover birth control if it interfered with their religious beliefs.

The truth was, though, it ran so much deeper than having my access to birth control threatened. So much deeper even than feeling threatened as a woman. Every day, with him in office, I feel threatened as a doctor, a scientist. I feel threatened as a person. I am a cisgender white woman. I can only imagine how other marginalized people feel in our country. Black. Hispanic. LGBTQ+. Anyone who is not a rich, white, heterosexual, cisgender, male.    

When I was living in Thailand, I travelled to a nearby town, one I can’t remember now. I did a tour of something that has also since slipped my mind—something with looking at trees and birds in a swamp. But what I do remember is a German man, who was on the same tour as me. “I hear Trump is going to be your president,” he said.

At the beginning of the tour we had gone around the van and said where we were from. Now, we had our cameras slung around our necks, snapping pictures of the trees in the swamp, our feet hot on the wooden walkway that twisted its way around the ecosystem. This was prior to the election, before even all the primaries had wrapped up. Trump was not even the presumptive Republican nominee at the time.

“That’s not true,” I said. I looked back into my camera and zoomed in on a white crane in the distance. 

He snickered a bit. I knew it wasn’t at me, but at the sheer thought that our country could be so idiotic to even entertain the idea of his presidency.

He walked away before I could say anything else.

I was embarrassed. Why hadn’t I said I was from Canada? Why hadn’t I invoked the rule we had so often talked about but never enforced? 

This is how the world sees us. They were laughing at us before Trump was even the nominee.

For the last four years they’ve been rolling around in the rafters, pointing their fingers at the spectacle.

The pandemic in some ways has created an even playing field. It’s a sick twisted way to test the leaders of every country given the same scenario. The U.S. – despite our wealth, despite our resources, despite our assumed place in the world powers – has failed utterly. We have the most cases of the virus. The most deaths. Our government has failed our healthcare workers. Our teachers. Our marginalized communities. We are a spectacle for all the world to point at and say: That is what not to do.

Citations:

Cartoon by Kevin Kallaugher

Wright, L. (2020, July 20). Crossroads. The New Yorker, 18-23.

definition: American

Foreign Affairs

And I’m proud to be an American

Where at least I know I’m free

I am not proud to be an American. I’m sure that doesn’t come as a shock to anyone. I’m sure half the country at this point is no longer proud to be a part of this nation. It’s the way we have handled this pandemic, the way our government continues to down play the seriousness of this virus, the mis-united front on the importance of wearing masks. It’s the way we have treated our minorities – black and Hispanics, immigrants, and Native Americans. It is the very fact that our nation elected someone who sees women as mere sexual objects and thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to slur racist and xenophobic phrases all over the press.

But I wasn’t proud to be an American before all this happened.

When I moved to Thailand my friends and I would half joke about telling people we were Canadian rather than American. We never were able to admit it to anyone but the simple idea of lying to people about our nationality struck me. It came up over and over again during the two years I lived there.

We were traveling through Indonesia the first time someone in our group brought up the idea. A pair of Americans had been killed and we thought, for safety reasons, it would be best to say we were from Canada. “Everyone loves Canadians,” one of my friends said. “Eh?”

Only a few hours later, while at a festival in one of the main streets of the city, an Indonesian man approached my friend Sam, the person who had suggested we say we were Canadian.

“Where are you from?” the man asked after a quick hello.

Sam was wearing white linen shorts and a green tank top with straps so thin they barely existed. The man stared at her white tanned shoulders.

“Um,” Sam hesitated. We all looked at her, ready for her to start the lie. “We’re from the U.S.”

When the man walked away Chris punched her on the same white tanned shoulder.

“I couldn’t do it,” Sam said.

We never were able to tell anyone on that trip that we were from Canada, although each time someone asked us where we were from we hesitated, thinking about giving the lie instead.

Me, Haley, Sam, and Chris in Indonesia

This idea came up again when I travelled to Laos. America had bombed the border of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam during the Vietnam War so that the rebels couldn’t obtain any supplies. There were still hundreds of thousands of those bombs left behind – undetonated. Kids, in small villages, would come across a scrap of shining silver buried in the dirt. Curious, they’d unearth the thing, only to be blown up. Killed. Or otherwise their limbs detached. The silver from these undetonated bombs had become quite valuable, especially for the remote villages where many of them lay. People began seeking them out, exploding their limbs in the process.

I watched a short documentary on the subject in a small museum tucked into an odd part of the city. The museum was really only a large room full of fake legs that hung from trellises on the wall. It was located on the same campus as the clinic where the amputees from these bombs came to pick up their new legs—prosthetics I must add that are antiquated and hardly functional. In the documentary, they noted that it would take over 100 years for all the bombs to be unearthed and unarmed at the rate they were currently going. There were no American helpers in this effort.

Why hadn’t I learned about this in school?

I walked around Laos for the next week feeling an awful shame and guilt burn inside me each time I saw a small boy with one leg or an older woman begging on the street with a prosthetic attached to her hip. This guilt burned deeper when I told people that I was from the U.S. I felt as I if I should apologize each time I said it. Yeah, I’m from America and I am so so sorry for all that my nation has done to yours.

Living and traveling around Southeast Asia, was unfortunately, not the first time that I felt this kind of shame about being an American. The first time I felt it was when I studied abroad. I was in history class where we learned about the socialist movement in Chile and the rise of their late dictator Pinochet, who tortured and killed many people who favored socialism. I learned that the U.S. had backed his presidential campaign and that when he lost, they helped conspire the coup that ultimately killed the socialist president at the time, and put Pinochet in power. Once the U.S. found that Pinochet was torturing and killing his own people they did nothing to undo their mistake.

Why hadn’t I learned about this in school?

It wasn’t just the foreign politics we didn’t learn about, though. We never really learned about the history of Native Americans. Sure, we learned about the Thanksgiving dinner, but how much of that is actually true? As an adult, it now feels closer to a fairy tale than a real story. We briefly learned about the Trail of Tears in the fourth grade. But the atrocities we wrought on the Native Americans stopped there. We never discussed why there were no Native American students in our class, or the fact that Native Americans still live on reservations that are struck with poverty and limited resources. Still to this day I have never been on a Native American reservation, which feels wholly un-American.

I thought for so long that the American education system was devoid of propaganda. We weren’t communist China, after all. We weren’t afraid to tell the truth to our students. At least that’s what I thought. Travelling and learning about our history through the eyes of another country, I found that we had done exactly that. We had shaped our history the way we wanted to be portrayed.

We learned about World War I and World War II, not the Vietnam War, which we had lost and most of the country disagreed with. We learned about the American Revolution and how we triumphed over a world power. We learned about the Civil War and slavery and the Equal Rights Movement but never discussed how in many ways black people still face discrimination and are disproportionately affected by poverty and illness and policing.

Our education was designed to show the shiny, clean aspects of our history, to highlight the best parts of our society and to hide the things that didn’t flatter us. Our education, in short, demonstrated all the ways in which America was the greatest country in the world.

And I believed it, for a long time.

definition: American

The Greatest Country in the World

And I’m proud to be an American

Where at least I know I’m free

This Fourth of July felt different, not because of the lack of BBQs and firework shows, or the closed bars in Denver, not even because it was smack dab in the middle of the pandemic where cases were rising and no one really knew how to celebrate safely. No. It felt different because I wanted to protest the holiday. The lyrics of God Bless the USA rolled around in my head and I firmly asserted against them: I am NOT proud to be an American.  

For many of the last six years I have been out of the country during the Fourth of July. I spent it in classrooms with Thai first and second graders, coloring American flags and displaying flashcards at the front of the classroom, the kids mouthing the words after me: watermelon, fireworks, BBQ, hotdog, flag.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Fourth of July, mostly because I don’t have any traditions and I like holidays with traditions. Growing up we’d go to the fireworks but otherwise the day was a typical day, consisting of errands and chores. Some years, when I was older, we’d go to our cousin’s cabin in Minnesota. But even there one year we didn’t watch fireworks, instead driving down from their cabin on the night of Fourth of July. I was distraught about that.

This year my boyfriend picked out a hike on the aptly named Independence Trail.

“Did you do that on purpose I asked him?” as we pulled off the highway.

“No. I picked it because it has really great views.”

And it did. We hiked to the top, our breaths ragged, wiping sweat from our brows with our bandanas and then pulling those same bandanas over our mouths when someone passed us coming down. We stayed at the top for nearly an hour, looking out over the valley with houses dotted in between the evergreens, the peaks rising in the distance and dark, foreboding clouds slowly creeping their way over our heads.

We spent the afternoon in a park with his friends, playing volleyball and Frisbee with fizzy drinks in our hands. The night ended on the rooftop of his friend’s apartment eating hotdogs and hamburgers. Fireworks burst along the horizon, the mountains dropped behind them like a picture.  

It was a quintessential Fourth of July. And yet, I felt that by celebrating it I was supporting a country that I had stopped agreeing with long ago.  

As a small girl, I thought the entire universe revolved around the U.S. In the second grade, our teacher taped a map of the world on the white brick wall outside our classroom. We placed strips of paper with our name on it where our family was from. I placed my strip of paper on Ireland. I was proud that I was one of only a few kids in the class who could claim their family was from another country. Most other kids put their strips on Colorado or Wisconsin or California. No one even knows what Ireland is, I thought. It’s such a tiny country. (I was surprised to find later that year, that most people knew exactly what and where Ireland was. It wasn’t a secret by any means.) I assumed the kids in Ireland though, knew about the U.S. Our country took up nearly a quarter of the map. How could you not know what that big chunk of land was?

We’re taught in school, whether intentionally or not, that the U.S. is the greatest country in the world. It’s a thought that has pervaded our culture for generations. When I prepared to study abroad, my junior year of college, the program showed us a video of college kids in white, red, and blue tanks, sunglasses on and beer cups in their hands shouting U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

“Don’t be like these kids,” the program directors warned us. “No one abroad appreciates you chanting our country’s name.”

When I left for Chile, I was still under the impression that the U.S. was the best country in the world. It was only after living there for six months that the illusion began to crumble.

Maybe it sounds naïve, but simply living in another country for six months made me realize that the much of the world was living very similar to us. I landed in Santiago de Chile with the misperceived image of a third world country. I thought I would be living in a house with a corrugated tin roof and be served rice and beans for every meal. What I found instead was a clean, modern apartment. It was small – the kitchen a narrow counter jammed between two walls so slim you had to slide your body in sideways to cook. But my host family was happy. They ate the same foods I ate – spaghetti for dinner and yogurt for breakfast – albeit with a few delicacies I didn’t care for. Sorry, Gladys, your lentil soup was not my favorite.

The advantage of being American, in other words, was less than I had been led to believe.

Now we have a president who wants to Make America Great Again. His entire campaign is based on the fact that the US is the best country in the world. He is re-instilling this rhetoric into the nation, or at least the half of the country that listens to him.

I, though, no longer think the US is the greatest country in the world. Far from it.