America

2016.11.30 Unpublished: America

11/30/16

I've never had a straightforward relationship with this country. I was born here, but moved to Holland when I was little, and went to Dutch schools, spoke Dutch at home, celebrated Saint Nicholas rather than Christmas… our family had to return to America under traumatic circumstances, compounding drama upon trauma with death, abuse, and loss. 

Horrifyingly, my own children's lives have repeated this pattern. We come crashing back to my family home in Utah, only in the wake of horrific loss. Now we're here trying to recover from the shock of it, and all the subsequent revelations about what was true, what we thought was true, and what we might be able to make true in the future. I'm still here ringing like a bell. 

But my children, they’ve reacted against our new place in a way that feels very familiar to me. Last night my six-year-old went to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, everything and replaced every syllable with the word poop. This was charming and seditious, but also very familiar. 

I remember wielding an imaginary machete as we drove down the streets in Washington DC, after crash landing there in the beltway after our lives in Holland fell apart. With my imaginary machete I chopped down all the telephone poles, the electric towers, the unappealing and vapid billboards. I missed the windmills, the cows, the rolling pastures, the cobblestones, the beaches and the oude boeren. 

As I grew up though, my antipathy towards America dwindled and my American identity solidified into something a little more --if not comfortable, at least resigned. Especially after living in Japan for several years, first as a missionary for the LDS church and then as an English teacher in a semi-legal cram school, I knew that whatever I was it was not Japanese. As much as I love the language and the culture and the food, as hard as I try to understand what was going on and why and no matter how excellent my test scores in the language assessments, I felt the cultural difference keenly.  

In Japan, I discovered I that was an American. I valued things that I have been taught in Maryland and Utah, about the importance of family ties, a connection to the land, our responsibility to care for the earth. I believed in equality, and the benefits of diversity, and felt it was a moral imperative to fight racism in ourselves, our communities, and the world. I believe those were American values. All men are created equal, and if we see inequality, we’re failing and we have to FIX it. 

In Japan, there's no such statement of belief. There's no moral imperative to treat immigrants and non-Japanese people with dignity. Of course there's human kindness, an individual goodness, but no institutional structures to make sure that as a collective the Japanese people are becoming more inclusive. 

I believed that that was an American dream, and I was willing to dream it. To widen our acceptance, to broaden our view. I thought that was the real manifest destiny. Not to overtake the world, but to broaden our minds to encompass the world. To be global citizens. Not to make the globe belong to us. 

This week I feel like those beliefs have been challenged.

Maybe America is a place of flashing billboards, of falling leaves hermetically sealed in garbage bags rather than being left to return to the earth and feed the worms, maybe it is a place of government subsidies for high fructose corn syrup but no subsidies for basic staples like milk and bread. Maybe it's a place of cynicism and disenfranchisement, of Tasmanian devil calf tattoos. 

This morning at 5:55, my grandma received a death threat via text. It's said “I'm gonna blow your candle out.” What the fuck.

Maybe America is just the land of undernourished, spiritually disconnected, violent rapists and child abusers. Maybe it is the place where we defund schools and overfund the military. Maybe all that “all men are creative equal” was just a sedative, an illusion to allow mobsters and industrialists to rape the land, and keep us all striving and complicit in the illusion.

How can this be? I've been away from The US of A for 10 years. Well-- Hawaii is technically a state, but the culture is very different. Americans who come to Hawaii struggle and thrash against the confines of a new culture that doesn't privilege their dollars and their desires over everyone else's health and safety. 

In Hawaii, the ruling principal isn't love (aloha), it's relationships (pilina). Newcomers complain that in Hawaii you have to know someone in order to get anything done. Uh duh! Of course you do! 

Is it insane that in America you can do things without knowing anyone, without having any kind of face-to-face investment in your commitments? You get jobs by appealing to the algorithms scanning your applications.

This is the land of road rage. This is the land of anonymity. Of late night terrifying phone calls to old ladies. 

I’m not saying Hawaiian relationship-based society is easier. I desperately wanted my independence and my privacy in Hawaii, and sometimes I wrangled against the obligations that knitted us into the community. But I’d rather cope with that stickiness than the kind of polished isolation I see here. 

People have a beautiful homes, and no friends. The highways are littered with shining advertisements, admonishments to laser your face, to make America great, to grab life by the ... bubbles. 

I felt very different from the people around me in Hawaii, very over-educated-white-American-millenial-woman. I was a weirdo for wanting to watch documentaries, or think about going for a PhD program, for updating my resume. Too much reliance on that palapala! 

But in other ways people understood me better than they do here. My very first year in Hawaii I remember auntie Val Hanohano across the street laughing at me. I was carting a barrel full of grass clippings from the pasture down the road to dump into my little backyard garden at our rental house. I was stomping around in gumboots and tattered jeans . She laughed and said are you sure you’re haole? You seem too country to be haole. 

I was so flattered!!

But she got it. Of course I wanted the grass clippings. Of course I wanted a compost bin. Of course I wanted starts of the vegetables and herbs that were growing wild along the road. Of course I needed to be able to provide my own food. Of course I needed to learn how to dig the oven, prepare the pig, and unearth the imu for the luau. Of course. Of course I would learn to show respect for the ocean and the jungle. Of course I would learn the chants and the correct names for those places. 

That's not an American thing or a Hawaiian thing, I thought, that's a human thing. Respect for the earth, respect for the people, interconnection, interdependence. I thought those were universal values, human values, and thereby (since America is allegedly populated by humans) American ones. 

But now I don't know. Maybe I am blind. Maybe I am an elitist. Maybe my privilege to travel the world to be poverty-stricken on a tropical island, to milk my own goats and harvest the eggs from my chickens… Maybe being that connected to the earth is a privilege that blinds me to Real American values. I hope I'm wrong. 

When my kids say they hate America, I want to argue with my kids, and tell them that there are good things about America. Tell them about the things that I learned about myself as an American in Japan, realizing that I do value creativity and innovation and independence and the idea of equality and the right to criticize the culture that spawned me. But I'm having a hard time believing that.