somewhat emotion-laden ramblings

[xaara]

Proceed at your own risk. I just think things out better in written form, is all.

For some reason I've yet to decipher, I'm very sensitive to symbolism. I see it in everything, even where it doesn't exist, sometimes. I see a flag and it's a piece of cloth, it's a war, it's a place that raised me, it's something I swore allegiance to before I knew how to spell the word and stopped swearing allegiance to as soon as I figured out exactly what that meant. It drapes in the background of smiling pictures: politicians whose names cascade hierarchically down office walls.

But it's more than that, and less.

It's the interstates in a blizzard, the McDonald's that's the only food for miles, and love it or hate it, I was born here, and whether or not I like it, this is part of my soul. So I can't say I hate this country. I can't. It's a physical impossibility.

That's not to say I haven't said it in the past. When I was fourteen and fifteen, when I had never loved anything enough to understand hate, then I could say it and say it freely and listen to punk and breathe coffee until it oozed from my pores and Man, I fuckin hate this place.

I had no idea what that meant. I had no idea what words meant. I had no idea.

All that I have ever asked from this country is a place to sleep, some air to breathe, other people who speak my language and smile my smiles and get dressed up to go to the diner and eat lemon pie. All I have ever asked is for a corner to make my life here. And I am so small, there must be a corner somewhere.

All I have ever asked is to grow up to be someone. Without fear. Knowing that my life is not costing others, knowing that my breath is not stealing someone else's, knowing that my home does not come back to me having raped and burned and decimated.

And I can't know that. Because it's not true, because my life is costing others, because my home does come back to me with blood flaking from its fingernails.

I don't.... I don't have the callousness to deal with that, I suppose. Most of the time, I can ignore it, can turn inward to words and outward to the joyous expanse of the pseudo-world online. But sometimes I read something or see something and that house of cards flutters apart, kings and queens and jacks and jokers staring up at me, hands tucked warm into their robes. Sometimes it's just not right, and I wish I could just hate this place and be done with it. But then the lake reflects the sunlight or someone who couldn't have grown up anywhere but the midwest crashes into my life and I love this land so fully my chest hurts.

My words aren't working properly. At all. This is not quite and more than what I'd intended to say, and is probably far more than you'd ever wanted to know. I just. Sometimes, I just don't know.

Comments

[bluesbell.livejournal.com]

I think this is very interesting and I'm glad you're sharing it. I've never really thought about how it feels for Americans who don't agree with their country's foreign policies, to have that love/hate relationship.

it's something I swore allegiance to before I knew how to spell the word and stopped swearing allegiance to as soon as I figured out exactly what that meant.

This is something I can relate to.

(Sometimes I think I should give in and just mem your every entry. *sigh*)

[xaara.livejournal.com]

You're in Finland, right? Did you grow up there? Is there something analogous to the Pledge of Allegiance?

It's just very difficult. It's like. I dunno. I love my siblings absolutely and unconditionally; there's nothing they could do to make me stop loving them. They could commit murder and I would never speak to them again, probably deny any relationship I ever had with them, but I would still love them, you know? It feels like a similar thing.

And it ties in with why I watch Supernatural, actually, because it's a show that taps into that love I have for this country. It really couldn't be set anywhere but here, and it's fascinating because of that.

[bluesbell.livejournal.com]

Yes, I grew up here. There's no Pledge of Allegiance- I was just thinking about the flag and the similar meaning it has here. About Winter War memorials and Independence Day songs and saluting the flag as a girl scout, and then growing up to be a pacifist. I wrote something about it here.

America is endlessly fascinating to me and I'm trying to understand it better, how it works, why it does what it does as a nation. Which is why I'm taking North American Studies, and also part of the reason I love Supernatural.
Randomly, my great grandmother was born in Michigan (where lots of Finnish immigrants went).

[xaara.livejournal.com]

It's always interesting to see what's considered part of your national identity when you're from another country. I suppose I know a little of what it's like to have an Italian national identity, but even then, I lived in Sicily, which has a very specific, very regional, almost isolationist way of looking at things.

A sense of patriotism is something you grow up with almost unconsciously, I think. I know that I wasn't really aware of myself in relation to my country before September 11, when everyone else suddenly became patriotic and I became uncomfortable with my own nationality.

There's a strong...anti-historical? (I don't know if that's quite the right word) attitude here, in a lot of people. I meet people all the time who have not the faintest idea of what's happened in this country, of who important historical figures are, of the basic timeline of our history. And it scares me; there's nothing more terrifying than willful ignorance, because I think it bespeaks a greater apathy towards the ebb and flow of human interaction, of our effect on one another and on our environment. It's why I love teaching, and being a tour guide, and wondering about things.

Bailey White, a first grade teacher and wonderfully perceptive writer, put a lot of the same sentiments of your post in a way that sticks with me every time I think about this sort of thing:

After school I looked through my Joan of Arc book before I packed it up to take home. I found some new smudges on top of the old smudges left on those pages by French children almost a hundred years ago. Then I thought of something. I turned to the title page and checked the copyright date. It was 1898.

Little French children six years old, reading that book when it was new, would have been just military age in 1914. And here am I, who should know better, in another country, with that very book in my hands, telling other children the same old lie:

Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori. (Mama Makes Up Her Mind, 1994)