Yesterday morning I woke to the clock radio. It was nine o'clock and the voice of garrison Keillor was reading the writer's almanac for September 9th, 2010. Apparently, it was the 160th anniversary of California's admittance into the union. It was the 31st state. A poem was read about San Francisco. I made two pieces of whole grain toast, not flat bread, and put some blackberry jam on them. I also had some tea with no mint in it.
I work at a best western up the street from my house and the other night the hotel was completely booked. This weekend there is a popular sprint car race in Chico, and many of the teams and fans stay at our hotel. Also, an away team playing in the local baseball league was staying with us. It was very busy and it started to rain quite hard. The races and the baseball game that night were both rained out. Disappointed and drenched fans returned to the hotel and asked if we had any laundry services there. I said no but offered to bring them new towels to dry off with. Later, two women on a road trip checked into the hotel. I talked with them about Monterey and how I had gone diving there once. When I left around eleven thirty, the entire town had the smell of the first heavy rain and wet leaves.
As this is written, I sit in the student union of my modern American university. I sit at a row of computers next to a place where students can buy coffee. I am reading an article about a small church in Florida that intends to burn a number of copies of the Quran in remembrance of September 11th. According to the article, this action will most likely inflame incidents with Al Qaeda and result in more attacks in the west and deaths of innocent civilians. Councils of churches in Pakistan and Indonesia are protesting. The government has asked the church to call off the event. If he decides to continue the protest, the pastor's actions will likely be protected by the constitutions right to free speech.
Before I left the Middle East I spent a few days in Lebanon. I have been accepted into the American University of Beirut as a transfer student in philosophy. The trip was intended to help me make my decision. If I decide to go, I would attend the school for the spring semester and would be there for probably two years at least. Money could be an issue. Visits home would be infrequent. Beirut is the strangest place I've ever been and the middle east is a strange part of the world.
But this isn't about Lebanon, this is about America. I think that a lot of folks in America are ashamed. Maybe just kids my age, but I think a lot of people. We're ashamed because we have everything. We're spoiled and we know it. As a nation, our wealth and standard of living is beyond comprehension for the rest of the world and we still aren't happy. Antidepressants are the most prescribed drug in the United States hovering around 1 in 3 adults being treated. We're unhappy with our government, were unhappy with our wars, and were unhappy with ourselves. We can't get along in our politics, we're divided in our values, and we don't feel like winners so much anymore.
I confess that I thought this way before. I knew America had been a great nation once, but I thought those days were long behind. I thought we'd become a greedy, insatiable, unhappy, machine of destruction and arrogance that can't mind it's own business. I wasn't proud of America anymore, and I thought things were going to get worse before they got better. I thought the experiment of democracy had failed. Perhaps I was right about these things.
But I am proud of America, hell I love America. I love America and all her horrible flaws. Not because we have abundant running water, or green trees, or clean air or wide spaces. Not because of In n' Out, or Target, or Blackwater, or Fox News. Not because of barbecues or the K.K.K. I don't love Glenn Beck. I don't love pretension in academia, I don't love health insurance companies. I do not love Starbucks.
I love America because we have the most unique problems in the world. The world has never seen such a strange experiment, so young and so powerful. Our nation has become so wealthy, so powerful, so influential beyond our ability to comprehend, that the people of America have become the poor sap holding the ears of a lion; we can't let go of such an incredible power, but now that we've got it we don't quite know what to do with it. It's as though the founding fathers; themselves a ridiculous smattering of radicals, aristocrats, idealists, religious freaks, and regular men and women, having only just carved a new lifestyle out of a new continent based on a completely new set of values, have handed the keys to wealth, power, freedom, and luxury to our strange, sorry, mixed bunch, and told us to do our best.
And so modern America has struggled, pulled this way and that by our definitively pluralist society, united by values killed for by people we've never met, each individual trying to do his or her best given our bizarre situation. While I was in Jordan, thinking about the terrible things done in the name of American around the world, our inescapable influence, I wondered what any other nation would have done given a similar situation. For example, what if Jordan had been given tremendous natural resources, relative freedom of hostile foreign presence, and an insatiable natural ambition and persistence of it's people, all within the historical blink of an eye, would they have done any better? Would they have harmed fewer people? Or helped more? Certainly our history has been bloody and checked with selfish ruthlessness on many occasions, but do any other nations have the right to criticize? Were they ever burdened with such wealth and power? Did they ever have an unexpected empire grow up beneath them overnight?
Last night, a friend of mine and I were talking about our lives, our futures, what we plan to do after we graduate college. She told me that she didn't think it was fair that she, as an American, had so much and so many opportunities while others around the world had so little. She wants to help others, but she doesn't know how. This sentiment is not uncommon these days and I share her feelings as well. People, many people, Americans, want to use what they have been given to help others. And this is why I love the United States. Because a country that can engender this idea in her people, no matter how that idea functions in practice, is worth defending. America contributes more humanitarian aid than any nation in history. It's clear that many Americans use the opportunities available to them to do wrong, but it's also true that there are many Americans out to do good in the world as well. America may create some of the biggest villains in the world today, but she also builds some of the greatest heroes.
It may be that the experiment fails. The whole project may fall apart. Capitalist individualism may pull our economy to pieces, social isolation may destroy our families, greed and selfishness may run rampant until all that is left is obscene poverty and obscene opulence, the military industrial complex may become the biggest international bully ever created, the private media may squabble and lie until we eat dirt for breakfast, the American dream has shown to be unsustainable and we have begun to see it's affects around the world; every conceivable modern problem with America may collapse the entire thing into itself, and many others with it. But, if these things do happen, the United States has produced, is producing, and will continue to produce clever, compassionate, determined people who are going to change things. And if that isn't enough, if the whole project fails despite our best efforts, how spectacular will that failure be! How noble a failure! That such a place existed where freedom was a real thing, and practiced. Where autonomy and tolerance and shared values were protected. Where people made up the rules as they went along and made things like Moby Dick, and the airplane, Johnny Cash, and the transcontinental railroad. If a place like this can fail, I'll be proud to be a part of that failure. And should it succeed, how much sweeter that success to have been won in a place like this?
There are good people here, who want to do good, and have the unlimited creative opportunity to address these strange new problems. The best of the best and the worst of the worst call this place home. The United States is a mess, but she is a glorious mess. And I don't care what anyone has to say about it, I am proud to be a citizen of the United States of America.
