A Proud Patriot Abroad
When I was an exchange student in Germany, I had to justify my patriotism for the first time in my life.
But not to the Germans. If anything, the Germans were overly solicitous. My classmates imagined glittering red-carpets and Hollywood-edited high schools. Older Germans recalled Kennedy declaring “Ich bin ein Berliner!” and Reagan demanding “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
They had questions, of course. None of them could understand why we wouldn’t enact gun legislation. They were horrified by how much our health care and education costs. But they appreciated the U.S.A. and didn’t question my pride in it. In a year of multiple host families, dozens of classmates, teachers, neighbors and shopkeepers and random people I met on the train, I can’t remember anyone confronting me with what I would call “anti-American” sentiments or telling me I shouldn’t be proud of my country.
No one, that is, except for a fellow exchange student. A sixteen-year-old from upstate New York. An American, like me.
He seemed ready to remark on all our country’s faults at the slightest provocation. It drove me absolutely nuts. Not because his comments were untrue, but because as Rotary Youth Exchange students our job was to be ambassadors—and shit-talking the country you represent is hardly ambassadorial.
It was more than that, though. The reason it drove me so completely batty was because it was so single-minded, entirely focused on the negativity. No one—and no country—is perfect. And we never will be. We’re all human, imperfection is one of the best things about us. But when you focus so entirely on those imperfections and boil the entire identity of anyone—or any group of people—to their greatest faults, of course you aren’t going to like what you see. He was deliberately excluding everything I love about my country.
It’s the spirit, I told him, of ingenuity and freedom. No, we don’t have a monopoly on either of those ideas. Yes, it’s gone wrong along the way. No one gets anything right on the first try, just ask a class of kindergarteners how long it took them to learn to hold a pencil.
What matters, I posited, is that we keep trying. There’s something in our culture that does not bow down to failure. It’s persistence, sheer stubbornness. The heroes we hold most high are the scrappy ones that refused to waver. Thomas Edison and his lightbulb. Alexander Hamilton writing his way through the founding of a new country. Martin Luther King, Jr. marching peacefully to a better future against all odds. Amelia Earhart ignoring the odds to conquer the skies.
We Americans don’t know how to give up. We dream big and believe the impossible is doable. We believe in the individual but become an incredible force when we unite against a common enemy. We can disagree and still fight to our dying breath for the right to do so. We choose to never stop, to keep pushing ourselves to do better, to believe in the promise of the future. Those values—equality, freedom, progress, imagination, perseverance—those ideas we built this country on, we’re going to keep improving on them, seeking to better embody them, until the whole grand experiment comes crumbling down around us—whether that be tomorrow or in a few millennia.
That’s worth celebrating, I said.
He told me he thought I was living in a dream world. All of that idealism was going out the window because everybody hated each other. No one talked anymore. That our collective crimes were too great to justify our continued existence.
He might as well have tossed me off the Fernsehturm—I felt like I fell 1,200 feet and splattered aginst the cobblestones. I knew (and still know) that my country had problems. There had been dozens of shootings in the U.S. just in those first few months of my exchange year. That October, there was a shooting at Sparks Middle School—just 50 miles from my hometown, a part of my community. In July, Detroit had filed for bankruptcy. The government shut down for the first time since the 90s. Snowden had just leaked NSA files exposing overreach. George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old, despite admitting he did it. And misogyny had almost prevented me from becoming an exchange student before I even applied. Would have, if I didn’t have that stubborn American spirit that refused to be told “no.” And on, and on.
Of course we had problems. But I’d never thought of them as insurmountable. This country was founded fighting for the then-crazy idea of self-governance. We went to war with ourselves over what we believed to be right. We won two world wars and created jobs in the midst of the Great Depression and built the then-tallest building in the world. We the people came out in droves, marching for suffrage, civil rights, peace. We went to the moon. We were the birthplace of inventions like the assembly line, airplanes, and the internet. We created world-class hubs for the arts, nurtured world-class athletes—like Jesse Owens, whose record-breaking 4 gold medals were earned at the stadium in Berlin I got to visit during my exchange. It was here that Walt Disney first drew up a mouse that changed the world, where he looked at a stretch of deserted land in California and said “If you can dream it, you can do it.” And this is where Frederick Douglass defiantly declared “The soul that is within me no man can degrade.”
It baffled me, how his view of the U.S. had become so hardened. I’d always considered the drive for progress, the desire to change my country for the better, to be a patriotic act. You have to love your country enough to change it when it’s hurting. Sometimes—often—we’re wrong. It takes strength to acknowledge that and seek to do better. My exchange year was July 2013-July 2014. A decade has passed, and sometimes it seems like things have gotten so much worse. Sometimes I wonder when I’m meant to give up, like that exchange student from New York already had. To accept that we are, in fact, the villains.
But I don’t think that’s the answer. You can’t solve problems by throwing your hands up in the air and walking away. That isn’t how any of the people I’ve mentioned thus far faced their problems. Some of them never saw the fruits of their labors. Some of them never got the change or the justice they deserved. Some might have gotten more than they deserved. Amelia Earhart vanished mid-flight. Jesse Owens faced relentless discrimination here at home. Martin Luther King’s dream is still a work in progress. Thomas Edison was kind of a pompous jerk. The Disney Company is now a pillar of global capitalism.
No story is all good or all evil. There are twists and turns, moments where we are the heroes and moments where we are the villains. If you judge any of us by a single moment in our lives, you might find us angelic or sinful, honest or conniving, capable or broken. It’s the compendium, all the moments laid out in a row, that we should be judged by. The trajectory. Our gradual but steady rise or our determined downward spiral. What choices we make when it matters: to drag ourselves towards something a little bit better or to continue willfully down a darker path.
I still believe that the heart of the United States of America is bright and hopeful, beating strong with the ideals of equality and liberty, ingenuity and perseverance, progress and exploration. I believe in an America worth celebrating, of American heroes across politics and art and science and athletics who deserve to be remembered for their net good. I believe we can learn from their mistakes and do better in the future, to continue to uphold the values that have always made us great.
I’m proud to be an American.
Happy 4th of July! This is more introspective than my usual fare, and I hope you enjoyed it. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and it felt fitting for the occasion.
I hope you all had a wonderful day today. And I hope my American readers had an opportunity to celebrate everything that makes this country great… and consider everything we can do to keep making it better.
