It was 1968, and I was listening to several speakers talking about my choices:
1. I could allow myself to get drafted and go to Vietnam.
2. I could go to jail.
3. I could cross the border into Canada and hope to be allowed to stay and become a Canadian citizen and renounce my American citizenship.
Fortunately, I found option #4: Get into medical school and hope the war ended in the next 4 years while I was deferred.
But, before I knew about option #4, as I talked about these options with my friends, we all realized, individually and collectively, no matter how disgusted we were with our country, which was incinerating babies in Vietnam with Napalm, no matter how we loathed Johnson, Nixon all those government leaders who kept us in that quagmire rather than risk their own political futures, we could not simply walk away from being Americans.
I had never been outside the country at that point, but nearly four years later I went to England for two months, and there I discovered just how American I really was.
As alienated as I felt from my own country, it was part of me.
It was threaded through the fabric of my personality and soul: the music, the shared memories of sporting events, the unconscious assumptions that I wanted life to be more prosperous, that I wanted to rise from the social standing my parents enjoyed to something just a little better, the desire to own things, a house, a car.
As I talked about American movies, about the Super Bowl, about suburban life, about an American Graffiti sort of high school experience with my American friends in London, one a Black kid from the Bronx, another a kid from Texas who was attending medical school at Pittsburgh, we thought of ourselves as very different, but we shared something--being American.
None of us had thought much about what being American meant. But we knew, somehow, we were and we could never really shake that.
So it doesn't matter who is in the White House today. He'll be gone in eight years, and we'll still be, like it or not, American.
1. I could allow myself to get drafted and go to Vietnam.
2. I could go to jail.
3. I could cross the border into Canada and hope to be allowed to stay and become a Canadian citizen and renounce my American citizenship.
Fortunately, I found option #4: Get into medical school and hope the war ended in the next 4 years while I was deferred.
But, before I knew about option #4, as I talked about these options with my friends, we all realized, individually and collectively, no matter how disgusted we were with our country, which was incinerating babies in Vietnam with Napalm, no matter how we loathed Johnson, Nixon all those government leaders who kept us in that quagmire rather than risk their own political futures, we could not simply walk away from being Americans.
I had never been outside the country at that point, but nearly four years later I went to England for two months, and there I discovered just how American I really was.
As alienated as I felt from my own country, it was part of me.
It was threaded through the fabric of my personality and soul: the music, the shared memories of sporting events, the unconscious assumptions that I wanted life to be more prosperous, that I wanted to rise from the social standing my parents enjoyed to something just a little better, the desire to own things, a house, a car.
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| General Cump--Obadiah Youngblood |
As I talked about American movies, about the Super Bowl, about suburban life, about an American Graffiti sort of high school experience with my American friends in London, one a Black kid from the Bronx, another a kid from Texas who was attending medical school at Pittsburgh, we thought of ourselves as very different, but we shared something--being American.
None of us had thought much about what being American meant. But we knew, somehow, we were and we could never really shake that.
Well Phantom aren't we all the luckier that you were able to land Option 4. One can see where the Canadian option might have appeared a lot less painful than the other three-but it wasn't. You would never have felt Canadian-you would have always been an American in exile. No kind of life. Other nations may be lovely and surpass us in some important areas, but I'm very grateful to be a citizen of the US-warts and all. Oh and historically there have been some pretty big warts-slavery, Jim Crow, McCarthyism, the subjugation of women etc. Why just look at the enormous wart sullying the Oval Office as we speak. Still-I'd take being an American over any other option..
ReplyDeleteMaud
Ms. Maud,
ReplyDeleteGreat minds think alike. There's a wonderful piece in today's NYT by Janine di Giovanni, "What Living Abroad Taught Me About America" which speaks to this.
Bascially, what she is saying is once you are American, you cannot shake it. For all the horrible things America has been and is still, it's woven into your fabric, into your soul, and you cannot escape it.
Your grandparents may have lived in Ireland and mine in Estonia, once you are raised here you are more like me than you are like any Irish, and I like you. In ways we hardly can name. It's a mysterious thing really.
It's like that bad boy boyfriend you cannot abide--he's just so exasperating, so misbehaved, but he's in you and you know there is nobody else for you, in the long run.
Well, I don't really know about boyfriends, but that's what you see on TV.
Phantom