For as long as I’ve been in the states – 14.5 years and counting – I’ve never been able to call myself an American. Well, it looks like that isn’t changing anytime soon.
I’m not disappointed that Kerry lost the election, per se. (Although I am horrified that Bush will get four more years to screw me personally and the rest of this country sideways, and the rest of the world too, for as long as it lets him.) I am numb, because more than half of this country’s active voters have clearly stated that their value systems are more or less polarly opposed to mine. This state of affairs is unlikely to change in my lifetime.
Ethan points out that, as far as places to live go, we’ve got it pretty good: Rhode Island has a long and mostly noble history of respectful dissent and relative freedom. We are surrounded by hard-working people who think and are mostly informed, and who see and understand the wide world beyond U.S. borders, which is more than I can say for the majority of this country. And still, I feel an alien.
This country has given me more opportunities than my home, that’s for sure. I am well educated, well fed and have certainly had my mind blown by art like nowhere else. Thanks for that. But while the house I live in is my home, and Ethan is my love, the country that surrounds us isn’t home, and I am not a patriot.
There you have it, I didn’t realize I needed to say that. I am not a patriot of this country any more than I am a patriot of any other. I’m deeply touched by the events here, but ultimately no more so than I am by events in Uzbekistan; except, of course, that the brutalities of the Uzbek government do not impact my life directly, while Bush’s religious-right moral agenda does.
The upshot is, I won’t change this country. I make a bad political activist, and in fact want all those sixty million people to feel and do whatever they feel like doing with their lives. If they want to teach creationism in Alabama schools, fine. Teach it. I think it’s a crock of shit, and I don’t want my children learning it exclusively at all as a truth, but they should be able to do it. That’s the point. Too bad that sort of thinking also leads to beatings of gays to death, but the answer isn’t trying to persuade those people to soften, it’s to get the hell away from them.
Easy for me to say, I don’t have a home here. Many do. There are gays in Georgia who just got a big old fuck-you from their home state, who don’t want to leave it. They, in fact, love it as patriots do. I can only wish them the best of luck, and strength for the long road ahead. I can’t fight the juggernaut that has always been here.
I want to move away. Not defect, not even entirely unpatriotically – hell, I might end up teaching English sometime, and the English I’d teach would certainly be American. But I want to move to a place filled with people whose core values more closely approximate mine. Preferably an entire sovereign entity like that.
I’ve resolved to keep a better eye on national politics, not only during election year but always. More, though, I’m interested in getting to know the national newspapers of the top contender countries for such a move. Take the time to find out what they’re really about, and limit my political activism here to donating money to organizations that will be better activists than I.
Home is where the heart is; my home is with Ethan and with my other friends and family, but my heart is not with America. It rejects me again and again; it’s not my home.
