I used to be one of those people who loudly and proudly hated America. This was a country that embarrassed me. Our politicians, our history— the whole thing felt like a terrible nightmare, a car crash you can’t look away from. I would watch political debates at night and cringe into my hands.
We’ve got a blotchy history. A dark one, in many places. I didn’t understand how you could love a country with such a complicated past. How do you love the place where slavery ravaged the land? Where natives were killed en masse? Where women lost their bodily autonomy, and equal marriage took centuries to make?
It’s still hard, sometimes, to love a place where all of that awfulness lived, where it still lives at some points. But something has changed in me, and I’ve found that how I feel about America, the self-touted land of the free and home of the brave? It’s a lot more complex than I ever expected it to be.
There is hardship, blood in this land’s bones, but my grandparents on my dad’s side tilled the dirt too. They were western Pennsylvania farmers, had acres of land that they used to create with, to grow pear trees and raise chickens on. It was hard work, but they did it. Spent days and weeks and years and decades waking up before the sun did.
My mother’s grandparents were immigrants, southern Italian. They opened a fruit stand with nine kids and counting and made their way into something they could be proud of. Lived in a smoggy city all their lives, sure, but managed to keep their culture alive in this melting pot.
That’s just beautiful to me, in a strange way. That farms and cities can all fit together under one nation, that immigrants and their children built our country up from the ground. We have blackberries here, we have raccoons. What other country has raccoons? I didn’t see it before, but I’m getting older (or, as old as a high school senior can get) and those sort of things matter to me. The United States has committed a million sins, but it also gave me Walt Whitman and Johnny Cash.
Our country is complicated, but so is every country. We’ve made mistakes, we keep making them, but we try to fix them too. It might take decades, but America owns our faults. And more than the policies and politicians, the people that live here push change along. It isn’t the Constitution or any other centuries old document that gave me hope for America, but rather the people who live here.
We’re immigrants. Farmers. Steel workers. Teachers. Bartenders. Starbucks baristas. Walmart cashiers. Mothers and fathers and sons and daughters. People who love each other, who hate each other, who are indifferent about each other, who don’t even really know each other.
It’s so easy to blindly hate America for what it is, but no one wants to do the hard work of forming it into something worthwhile. There is so much goodness here; the U.S. isn’t evil by nature. It takes a country to keep that goodness going, and the people that live in this one give me hope.
Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t say I love every aspect of America. There are definitely still things that make my blood boil, or make me wish I lived literally anywhere else, but there are parts of it that make me hopeful. I look out my car window, and sometimes I see the Appalachian mountains. That’s better than I expected. That’s good enough for me.
