Although there are very few minutes of the Fourth left, I have to confess my attitude on this holiday. I hope none of my many loyal readers are offended or put off by this, but I have to be honest here.
I love America.
I know, childish. Looking at how we treat the rest of the world, even how we treat our own citizens at times, our checkered past, our shadowy future, our disproportionate consumption of the world’s resources, how can I be so simple-minded?
But I am.
When I was sixteen I was an exchange student to New Zealand. Great place. Beautiful and clean, astonishingly so. I went there as a kid who had bounced around quite a bit. I figured people were pretty much the same all over, and I could live practically anywhere. I mean, I’d lived on some fairly odd American soil. How different could NZ be? At least they spoke English.
And they actually weren’t all that different. Just another collection of people, with all the accompanying strengths and weaknesses. I enjoyed being there, interested in all the differences and similarities. But I never quite felt at home, never quite settled in.
About a month after I got there, I went on a camping trip with the 6th form (11th grade class). Now, the expectations of students in New Zealand are a bit more…intense then you might find here. A camping trip there, I soon found, was something more like a forced march. Lord. With great whacking packs on our backs, we hiked, and hiked and hiked, for days. I don’t mean strolling and chatting, I mean lines of sweaty kids, grimly making their way through the wilderness. I had a lot of time to think.
And what I thought about was my unease in this country. I considered what bothered me. Was there something wrong with the society I had found myself in? Or (more likely), was there something wrong with me? I thought a lot about me. I was 16.
Before long, it hit me. New Zealand was fine. There were great things about it. But it wasn’t mine. As simple as that. I could spend the rest of my life weighing the pros and cons, the good points and bad about each nation. But America was mine. Like a mom, spotting her own child’s goofy hair sticking up out of a crowd. Her heart melts for that one. Her own.
I spent the rest of that trip singing patriotic songs in my head. At the campfire that night, someone jokingly asked me to sing my national anthem. I jumped to my feet and sang it with great fervor. And passable accuracy. Because I meant it.
The year I spent in New Zealand was amazing. I hold that place pretty dear. But it’s just not mine.
Happy Independence Day.