It's a weird time to be American.
A lot of people are questioning exactly what that means, to be American; not that this nation's history hasn't been rife with identity crises. In some ways it seems like the same story over and over again, with slightly different characters. That's what we get for being a melting pot, I guess. An eternity of lab-testing our ever-changing alloy, at super high temperatures.
This week also marks 150 years since the Battle of Gettysburg, widely heralded as the turning point of the Civil War, after which the secessionists had very little hope of winning and the Union began to take shape with greater certainty.
I can't say what it felt like back then, but if you ask me, the winners-and-losers paradigm doesn't apply very well to the wars we're fighting these days. Who really wins? Who really loses?
Especially because, 150 years later, the "Union" doesn't seem particularly unified at all.
We're still fighting the injustices and questions that led up to the Civil War: Racism. States' rights. There are so many huge issues up for debate at the current moment, issues that bring to bear the very humanity of different groups of people. And in the absence of any foolproof or even somewhat workable solutions, we have resorted to a pathological aversion to agreeing on anything.
I can hardly criticize, because I see fallibilities in a lot of the alternatives that have been put out for review, and I can't come up with anything that I'm satisfied with either; but such is being human. There are rarely foolproof solutions to anything. But I am convinced that, faced with this situation, our legislators and people in "power" have stuffed their ears with cotton, tied their blindfolds on, and strapped on their boxing gloves before they go in to "negotiations."
Maybe this is just politics and I am too green to understand, but I've heard this expressed by people who have been around a little longer than I have -- that, on the political stage, we are moving farther and farther away from any kind of bipartisanship.
But then, I understand that the hugeness and diversity of this country makes it hard for any one decision to cover all the bases. Since my highly disputed post about feminism, my eyes have been opened to the variety of experiences even people in the "same" community live on a daily basis. The other day someone I know, a female business owner, asked me if I knew of any minority female business owner groups in the area. She told me about a female professionals meeting she attended: "I walked into that room and I was the only face that wasn't white. Those women don't know what my experience is like."
Women, so often clustered together as a unified interest group, are different from each other. Another blog post on that subject for those who are interested, on how many different kinds of women there are and why one woman cannot truthfully speak for all women.
A classmate of mine just wrote a post about a book called How to Be Black, which I haven't read but probably will now. Thesis?
The Founding Fathers were anything but innocuous. They were not content to sit and wait for things to change for the better. You've heard their quotes:
But there is something tying us together. Maybe it is that we live on this soil. Maybe it is that we define ourselves as American, whatever our reasoning and rationale. And for all the subdividing we do to our identity, there is some beauty to the holiday, tomorrow: It is an opportunity, whether we take it or not, to share something.
I hope that we someday learn to listen to each other, and to treat each other with respect, and I hope it happens sooner rather than later. And I hope we can find enough common ground to stand on, to stand up for our neighbors even if they are different from us. Because no matter how many things are different, there will always be something the same. We just have to look for it.
A lot of people are questioning exactly what that means, to be American; not that this nation's history hasn't been rife with identity crises. In some ways it seems like the same story over and over again, with slightly different characters. That's what we get for being a melting pot, I guess. An eternity of lab-testing our ever-changing alloy, at super high temperatures.
This week also marks 150 years since the Battle of Gettysburg, widely heralded as the turning point of the Civil War, after which the secessionists had very little hope of winning and the Union began to take shape with greater certainty.
I can't say what it felt like back then, but if you ask me, the winners-and-losers paradigm doesn't apply very well to the wars we're fighting these days. Who really wins? Who really loses?
Especially because, 150 years later, the "Union" doesn't seem particularly unified at all.
We're still fighting the injustices and questions that led up to the Civil War: Racism. States' rights. There are so many huge issues up for debate at the current moment, issues that bring to bear the very humanity of different groups of people. And in the absence of any foolproof or even somewhat workable solutions, we have resorted to a pathological aversion to agreeing on anything.
I can hardly criticize, because I see fallibilities in a lot of the alternatives that have been put out for review, and I can't come up with anything that I'm satisfied with either; but such is being human. There are rarely foolproof solutions to anything. But I am convinced that, faced with this situation, our legislators and people in "power" have stuffed their ears with cotton, tied their blindfolds on, and strapped on their boxing gloves before they go in to "negotiations."
Maybe this is just politics and I am too green to understand, but I've heard this expressed by people who have been around a little longer than I have -- that, on the political stage, we are moving farther and farther away from any kind of bipartisanship.
But then, I understand that the hugeness and diversity of this country makes it hard for any one decision to cover all the bases. Since my highly disputed post about feminism, my eyes have been opened to the variety of experiences even people in the "same" community live on a daily basis. The other day someone I know, a female business owner, asked me if I knew of any minority female business owner groups in the area. She told me about a female professionals meeting she attended: "I walked into that room and I was the only face that wasn't white. Those women don't know what my experience is like."
Women, so often clustered together as a unified interest group, are different from each other. Another blog post on that subject for those who are interested, on how many different kinds of women there are and why one woman cannot truthfully speak for all women.
A classmate of mine just wrote a post about a book called How to Be Black, which I haven't read but probably will now. Thesis?
"It doesn't make sense to work toward ending your personally offensive -ism and in the process make any of the others worse. It doesn't make sense to work toward equality for women but to worsen the inequality against the LGBTQ community, or the African American community, or those who are experiencing homelessness, etc. ...We really do all have to work together, on behalf of one another."I spent a lot of today looking up patriotic (but politically innocuous) quotes to post on client social media sites. It turns out -- are you ready for this? -- that if anything is politically innocuous, it sure ain't patriotism.
The Founding Fathers were anything but innocuous. They were not content to sit and wait for things to change for the better. You've heard their quotes:
"Give me liberty or give me death!" - Patrick Henry
"Occasionally the tree of Liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Thomas JeffersonThings have changed since then. Americans are different. We are different from each other. We speak different languages and different versions of those languages, we come from different places and have different experiences from each other. We were not all born here, within these borders (which themselves are arbitrary)...
But there is something tying us together. Maybe it is that we live on this soil. Maybe it is that we define ourselves as American, whatever our reasoning and rationale. And for all the subdividing we do to our identity, there is some beauty to the holiday, tomorrow: It is an opportunity, whether we take it or not, to share something.
I hope that we someday learn to listen to each other, and to treat each other with respect, and I hope it happens sooner rather than later. And I hope we can find enough common ground to stand on, to stand up for our neighbors even if they are different from us. Because no matter how many things are different, there will always be something the same. We just have to look for it.
Before I came in here as an exchange student, I was provided a three-day orientation on American peculiarities. The biggest lesson that I learnt was that "it is not better, it is not worse, it is different". And it will be useful for everyone to understand it. In this great country people should stop defining difference as something good or bad. Let time and historians to decide upon it. This nation is the nation of immigrants and it might take a few more hundred years to shape its identity out of all different colors and ideas.
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