dipping in my toes

One of my grandmother’s favorite anecdotes of my childhood, one of those stories the whole family heard over and over, tickled her every time she recalled. I suppose I was four or so, just old enough to have started preschool, and she was giving me a bath. According to her smiling lips, I very suddenly jumped straight up to my feet in the tub, placed my hand over my heart, and recited the Pledge of Allegiance. Stark naked and dripping wet, I was apparently very proud of myself.

But to be quite honest, at nineteen, I don’t remember the last time I felt very patriotic. There was no monumental event in my life that made me feel un-American, but more like a slow but sure progression that has caused me, today, to feel more distaste than love for my country.

When I was sixteen my family hosted a Moldovan foreign exchange student in our home for a year. Stela was the first person I had ever been remotely close to who wasn’t an American and her strange ways shocked me into the reality that other people exist. She cooked us weird, gross-tasting food, walked slower than any person I’d ever met before, and I didn’t like it. So I shut my eyes and ignored.

picking up Stela at the airport

I suppressed my knowledge of other peoples and cultures and forced myself to live in my little American bubble. It by no means made me happy, though, and in fact it caused me to question Americanism altogether. I began to stand in quiet respect during the Pledge, but refused to say it myself. I didn’t want to pledge my allegiance to something I didn’t believe in or necessarily automatically support. Because that was what was happening to me: I was beginning to see specks of dirt on the American lifestyle that paraded itself down the main street of my life.

That same year I sat in the classroom of a young English teacher, Mr. McIntosh, who became one of my most influential teachers during my high school years. I admire him most for helping me to recognize my own writing abilities as well as inspiring me to possibly one day become a teacher myself. But through our study of American literature that year, Mr. McIntosh also helped me to recognize and interpret for myself what is “The American Dream”. The last literature selection we read that year was J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, a fabulous book. Holden Caulfield will never cease to be one of my favorite characters of all time. Hilarious, blunt, and psychotic, I am certain there is a part deep down inside of me that he dictates quite well.

His inner monologue blurts out at one point that, “people always think something's all true.” I think he’s onto something. That whole “American Dream” thing—maybe it’s not all true. No matter how badly we formulate and strive for it to work, it’s not solid gold. So things began to crack. I think that false worlds must fall apart for our realization of the real world to impart its truth. My American world was falling apart, and it only continued.

In the year following my uncovering of the less-than-glorious aspects of American society, I took my first trip abroad. To Moldova, actually, and spent a week visiting orphanages in the post-Soviet country. That’ll rock any eighteen-year-old’s world. Only hours after the last orphanage had been visited, in the middle of a big team dinner actually, I had a complete meltdown, a catharsis of hysterical sobbing. I wept for a world in desperation. It was good.

my beautiful orphans

Something about seeing all those orphans made me resent growing up in the land of Wonderbread and see-saws. I returned home disgusted by the number of outfits in my closet, sickened by plethora of food in my pantry, and in shock at the juxtaposition of these two entirely different worlds. Now not only was my picturesque view of America painted by the society that raised me tainted, but all I wanted to do was crush it under my feet.

One of my favorite bands, Switchfoot, sings, "I want out of this machine. It doesn't feel like freedom. This ain't my American dream. I want to live and die for bigger things. I'm tired of fighting for just me. This ain't my American dream." That really said it all for me.

There was a snowball effect. I didn’t want to be an American girl anymore. I was crushing her along with everything else. Again, I retreated into a world where I could escape being an American. I denounced most everything the current state of the U.S. encompassed and left it at that. Naively placing yet another band-aid on what was becoming a gaping wound.

Then I went to college. With a bunch of people who, like me, are figuring things out, being who they are becoming, and questioning the world they were raised in. Hendrix, my school, is featured in a book by a man by the name of Loren Pope entitled Colleges that Change Lives. In it he writes, “Hendrix knows…that they must prepare students to live in a global rather than American world.” A global rather than American world. I like that a lot.

And there’s a lot to that—much, much more than I currently grasp. At Hendrix and in my life, I am learning to live in a global rather than American world. But to my stupid surprise, such learning calls for me to identify once more with my Americanism. Not exactly something that I’m excited to jump into. I’m not the little girl running with all her might to the high dive. I’m the little girl on the side of the pool who, after much coaxing, dips her toe in.

So I will dip in my toes. And more will come, and maybe one day I will be free to splash and play. I find that funny, because America really is supposed to be about freedom, isn’t it?

I am an American. But foremost I am a global citizen. That, however, requires of me to identify with the position in which I have been born. As an American.

So what better time than now? There is a great American spectacle before me. This election—and you better believe I’ll be voting. I’m becoming opinionated, and I’m starting to care. Really, really care about this election. I actually am starting to want to turn on the TV and see what Barack Obama and John McCain have to say.

They’re talking about change, and I am very engaged. Because being an American for me is not about saying the Pledge of Allegiance in a dreary old classroom at nine in the morning everyday for twelve years. It’s about getting in the water and jumping up with my hand over my heart, soaking wet and bare. Proud, but humble. Because I’m learning to take chances. Because I’m realizing that just because my country is messed up doesn’t mean that I need to contribute to the problem by disengaging. Because we are blessed, and I want to employ everything I’ve got as an American to make a difference. To make change. Because I need change just as much as we need change.

Back in The Catcher, Holden’s teacher and mentor says things quite well-

"Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."