What Makes Us True Americans?

I wrote this in 2016, but it's even truer now. Got my waders on...

HOW OUR CULTURAL DNA BINDS US TOGETHER.

Credit: iStockPhoto: DNA string - Firstsignal

Guten morgen, buenos Dias, यही है ना?

When I was little, I had no thought of country, state or town. There was just here, with my parents, my brother, and my friends.

I grew up in an exceptional town in Tennessee named Oak Ridge. During WWII it was one of three sites for the Manhattan Project. And because of that, people from all over the world came to live and work there; many stayed.

Routinely, new children would show up in school each year from places like France, South Korea, Brazil, Sweden and a hundred other countries. Some spoke little English, but they rapidly learned, and we all played happily together and understood one another well. Meeting the new became the norm, something delightful and not to be feared.

I had no concept of racism or nationalism then, although I now realize they were probably there. To me, we were all friends and equals, no matter where we came from.

That was my life till the age of sixteen, when I left Oak Ridge. Only later did I appreciate it as a special place where people pushed the boundaries of the known world on a daily basis. Invention crackled in the air.

I also grew to know that Oak Ridge was not the wider world. And while that understanding filled me with a low-level melancholy I’ve never quite been able to shake, I also maintain a hopeful attitude toward my fellow human beings. When I meet a new person, I’m fascinated and eager to learn what they think, and where they come from.

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Two Americas.

The gulf between my idyllic world of then, and the polarized world of today seems vast.

In this last year, I think we’ve come to a tipping point. The rise of nationalism and racism is palpable — not just here in the US, but abroad as well. Little is more frightening than a group of people hell-bent on destroying others.

There appear to be two Americas — one dynamic, outgoing, innovative; the other fearful, dogmatic, racist. One reaches outward, and the other pulls inward.

This isn’t a new idea, but it has ceased to be theory. Now it’s in practice.

In my glass-half-full way of thinking, those with an irrational desire to erase anything that smacks of other, are not the majority. I believe most people want harmony, not strife. We’ve had no experience being occupied or conquered — we cannot comprehend the emotional earthquake we’d all be living through if that happened here.

But so many who came here from places undergoing upheaval, do. They’ve lived it, and barely survived it. They know the horrors of war and how precarious life is under the rule of a dictator.

In these twin Americas, the rules of engagement differ dramatically. The We Can All Get Along (WCAGA) America sees the future as hopeful and expansive, and wonders why the We Hate Everyone Who Is Not Us (WHEWINU) group is so visibly and fundamentally pissed off.

The WHEWINU side is convinced the world is falling apart under them because the WCAGA America is letting the riffraff in. “Oh for Heaven’s sake, Frank, who are those people?”

Well, blow me straight to hell. Is it possible to have a real discussion when neither side can understand why the other feels the way it does? Without a meaningful conversation, where are we all going? Because we’re all going somewhere, and whether we like each other or not, we’ll be going there together.

Dogma certainly exists in both parties. Opinions rain down in ever more oppressive cascades, until it’s almost impossible to separate the cruft from words of real substance. The behavior of a certain Presidential candidate is utterly astonishing — in nearly 40 years of watching elections I’ve never witnessed such bombast, irrationality and narcissism. Who believes this man?

I am alarmed.

Are there really that many people in this country who think that immigrants should be excluded from the national discourse, and be barred from entry into the country? How can that be a thing? Where is the “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” mantra all of us were supposed to learn in school?

I love this country and the principles it was built upon a great deal. Having had the opportunity to live abroad in my teens and early twenties, those experiences made me realize that while this country does have many problems, in the larger picture, it remains one of the best places on the planet to live.

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How would you like your grasshoppers served, madam?

I would dearly love to send everyone in this country who thinks it’s irrevocably broken and beyond repair (thus requiring a Fourth Reich demigod to step in and save the day), to some off-the-beaten-path village in central America, southeast Asia, or central Russia for one year. Off the grid. Forced to learn a new language while figuring out how to work, eat, where to sleep, all the while feeling less than, shunned.

It would be cathartic to see how their accepted framework abruptly unravels — privileges most consider rights here hang by a thread in many places in the world, marginalized or absent entirely. Life is cheap and not particularly sacred. These are foreign concepts to Americans. The individualism we hold so dear, swept away by the autocratic State. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness — luxury items bought and sold by the wealthy and powerful.

Some think this is happening here. To a small degree, yes. The bigger the engine, the more complex it becomes, requiring further systems to address inconsistencies. But compared with so many other countries, absolutely, EMPHATICALLY not. In fact, those rights that we take for granted are actually privileges in this country as well. Many have forgotten that, or even sadder, have never been taught.

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Are you with us or agin’ us?

We live in the midst of a dichotomy being played out before our eyes daily in the news. Even though the concept of rugged individualism is deeply ingrained in the US, the dichotomy is that this nation of individualists must live in a collective society. Yet societies do not function when the rights of the individual obliterate the rights of others.

Collateral damage, whether by a bullet, a bomb or a word, is not justified in any situation. People have to get along, and unless we all want to live like porcupines, just far enough apart to not gouge each other, but close enough to stay warm, then we’d better start re-learning how to live with each other civilly. And yet, with the mere mention of societal responsibilities, the cry of Socialism! is raised and everything spontaneously catches fire.

Really?

Because, come to think of it, the Post Office, Social Security, Medicare, the National Park System, the roads, the US power grid, ALL of those services and many more are socialism personified. Hmmm. It would be nice to think that the veneer of civilization runs a tad deeper than it appears these days. Otherwise, we’re just nasty little monkeys with opposable thumbs.

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Cue the butterflies…

Now wipe away that thought: open on a scene of two small children. They don’t speak each other’s language, but that’s not going to stop them. They smile, giggle, and invent games that keep them occupied for hours on end. They’ve become friends. They value one another’s company. They meet each other at the same altitude. Such is the core, the foundation of the American experience, given the right beginnings.

It only takes one person from another culture to either plant the seed of shared understanding and create a lifelong empathy for others unlike yourself, or to fill your mind with the fear of the unknown. Would that everyone experienced the former right off the bat. It really does make life so much more fun.

Americans are the happy product of one of the most audacious experiments in human history. And it happened because people from so many nations came to this continent and wove their stories together in a common cloth. There is no other place on earth which has so celebrated its mongrelness.

We are hybrids, whether genetically, or culturally, or both. And hybrid vigor is undeniable — it’s revealed every day in the untold number of inventions, discoveries, businesses and ideas that spring forth. This remarkable penchant for creating something from nothing may be the single most identifiable trait we have. As a nation we’re collectively wired to dream of things never seen and make them real.

I’m not saying other nations lack inventiveness. It’s just that here, it is championed — it’s the highest achievement we can attain, to invent the next big thing. It’s the bedrock of our cultural DNA.

And what begets inventiveness? Hope. That and hundreds of cultures and languages, thousands of stories and experiences, all driving home the point that we are so very different from one another, and yet, we all smile, laugh, cry, love, hate and dream. We are members of one species. No one should ever, ever be excluded from a group because they’re different. They are the injection of new vitality in a petri dish that would grow something stale and boring otherwise.

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Quiet moments are sometimes the most powerful.

On a very cold December day many years ago, I went to see the Statue of Liberty. Ships glided on a quiet grey harbor as snow fell on the park, a soft stillness of an unsaturated world, punctuated by a single green monument.

I’d seen photos of it most of my life, but that day, I found myself utterly transfixed by its enormity, its resoluteness and its quiet dignity. I was not prepared for this.

There are moments in one’s life when the full-on, jarring concreteness of NOW drives every other thought out of your mind.

I came face to face with a symbol that epitomized the entire sum of the American Experiment. I felt simultaneously insignificant and mighty. It came to me what that meant: by working together, we can build anything. True power comes from collaboration.

A poem graces the base of the Statue and upon reading it, to my amazement, I broke down and sobbed. I still do when I read this.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

- Emma Lazarus

This poem speaks to our greater selves, where we celebrate our differences instead of vilifying them. Where we raise our collective potential through shared endeavor rather than through isolation and hatred.

When the dust settles after this election, regardless of who has won, it will fall to each of us to pick up the thread and continue. We have a choice in how we do that. Together as a nation or splintered as warring factions.

We are better than what we’ve been lately. I hope we find that thread of humility, decency and good humor again, for all our sakes. Because we’re ALL immigrants from somewhere else.

It just depends on how far back you want to look.

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n=9 is an experimental music project. In addition to talking about music, from time to time we’ll push the envelope to talk about other things. In the end though, doesn’t everything come back to connection? And connection through music might just be the most powerful.