What Does It Mean to Be an American?

What does it mean to be an American? This is a question that has actually become easier and easier for me to answer to myself as the days go by, but I wanted to get some thoughts down now before they really evolve and I start to think that my newfound ideas about the world have been there the whole time. This is important to do, in my opinion, because it isolates the moment I actively decided to self-educate from my heretofore steps towards active allyship. Which brings me to my first point.

Being an American means that you are taking the initiative to learn the truth behind the false, whitewashed history we’ve been spoonfed by a government that has encouraged our American exceptionalism while intentionally depriving us of the truth or misrepresenting it. And the truth is that, as a country, we really sort of suck. All of the wars, the freedom we supposedly fight for, the democratic values we use to justify everything from interference in foreign elections to our own voter suppression, all of it is because our leaders have steadily capitalized on the fundamental disconnect that exists between the American consciousness and literal reality.

This disconnect can arguably be traced back to the very inception of the United States, when men whom we celebrate for their supposed far-reaching visions failed to include women in the opening line of our Declaration of Independence. Seen through this lens, this historic document lauded for the boldness that Americans are known for exhibiting today becomes something else: the first, insidious stamp of sexism on the bud of the American psyche. Further, there is a breathtaking hypocrisy inherent in a document that proclaims its right to political liberation from an overbearing, unjust, and abusive State when that document is written by humans who owned other humans.

And yet, maybe that was the intent. The Founding Fathers would have been acutely aware that the freedom they proclaimed for themselves would have been unsubstantial without the financial means to militarily engage England– and that this financial security existed solely due to decades of human enslavement. Therefore, do not the following lines, which I have never seen quoted, speak to the Fathers’ wry intention that the document serve future purposes as justifications by the very citizenry they sought to establish that day?

Here is what I’m talking about

After that first part that everyone likes to quote (We hold these truth to be self-evident…), there’s more: “… to secure [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Let’s unpack that a little

First of all, there they go, talking about governments and men as if governments first and foremost implicate men. Please.

The Founding Fathers declared America’s independence with a document proclaiming the right of a citizenry to change or completely do away with a government that isn’t working for them. This is an evergreen statement that not only permits the American citizenry in 2020 to examine whether the current government system fosters their safety and happiness, but encourages it. What then to make of an infuriating percentage of Americans who cling to a corrupt buffoon and grotesque mutation of a political party comprised of buffoon-puppets as the standardbearers of the United States?

I come from a sick, deeply divided, and poorly educated country. When “freedom of choice” is snarled by the same people who block access to women’s healthcare, demand that Darwin’s Theory of Evolution be superseded by Creationism in their children’s education, and accept media politicization of masks, government is no longer working for the people. It is working for special interests, which to my mind is a synonym for sickness. The roots of our division lie entrenched in our 244-years of history, in our arrogance in thinking that because we are an enormous, rich country, we are exempt from balancing our accounts, from paying our debts to those whose safety and happiness remains forthcoming, nearly two-and-a-half centuries after Abigail Adams reminded her husband to “Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.”

The American Declaration of Independence continues: “…Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

This was written to justify the Colonies’ separation from England, a truly “long established” government. The world, but especially Americans, need to recognize that the history of the United States’ government is but a blip in comparison to the ancient European and Middle Eastern civilizations. And like all blips on a radar, ours should have been monitored for irregularities and inconsistencies. But they weren’t. So now, the American government is comprised of irregular and inconsistent leadership, polarized by truths and “alternate facts,” but always linked by drama.

To me, being an American means absorbing the truth that the very foundation of our country is cracking beneath our own bullshit. Every day, when I set aside a moment to scroll through the American news headlines, I’m reminded of the responsibilities I have to my country that I cannot ignore, regardless of where I am in the world: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Fortunately, exercising this right as it is ensconced in the Declaration doesn’t look like picking up a bayonet and running at a rifle. It means listening to Black Americans, reading uncomfortable and unpleasant truths, confronting those who minimize the pain of others, and practicing a hitherto unseen idea: empathetic patriotism.