Why I Love America

I am writing this shortly before an election, so I can imagine that everyone and his aunt have been bombarded by an unrelenting deluge of propaganda for the last several months. Whenever I receive a political panhandling text (usually about 5-10 messages per day) I respond by saying my polytheist adaptation of the Pledge of Allegiance before deleting it and reporting it as spam.

As I frequently make mention, humans are biologically wired to fixate upon the negative and there are good evolutionary reasons why this is so. I spent a great deal of my first half-century on this planet focusing on negativity because it was easier and it seemed like the most logical thing to do. Negativity feels like survival because it is survival. We all need some negativity to survive: not only would a Unicorn Farts and Rainbows outlook not suit me personally, it would be a dishonest and disastrous way of navigating the world.

So please allow me to take this moment to briefly recognize some of America’s many negatives, for they are legion.

America is a corrupt nation in a rogue’s gallery of corrupt nations. Our overblown, megalomaniacal government is vampiric, our culture is in a state of acute sepsis, and much of our infrastructure is falling to the ground. Ineptitude, neglect, and straight up bad design ensure that most of these problems will stay with us until America is no more. Our societal order is a fragile house of cards. It is one or two cancelled supply chains away from utter chaos. Yakkity yak, blah de blah blah blah. You’ve likely heard this all before and in much greater detail and with greater erudition. I now offer my contrary, unpopular opinion about why I love America. The following constitutes a handful of the reasons I will probably never leave the Midwestern prairieland where I was born until the day I am but ashes and other people’s memories.

The Spirit of the Land

A few of my good friends.

To be born in a place is to be made of its elements. In 1973, my sansei birthmother traveled to Chicago in exile from her East Coast home. She hid in shame after falling pregnant in college and disgracing her family. She allegedly refused to look at me the day I was born. I have always felt the psychic weight of her blame. I was given up for adoption at seven days after being born, and the only reason it was delayed that long was because I was jaundiced and needed treatment. I was adopted by two Chicagoans, both white and from the South Side. I won the life lottery. I got the best parents anybody could have after being born to a 22 year old girl who saw me as a horror who ruined her life. I did not try to contact her or even find out her name until my 30s. When I finally did make the mistake of reaching out via a state appointed Confidential Intermediary, my birthmother had already given up on America and her family here for the greener pastures of southeast Asia with her third or fourth husband. I could understand the sentiment. As a young person who did not like driving a car, I often felt the intense desire to move to another country, specifically one that was more likely to have a walkable city such as Amsterdam. Unlike my only known living genetic forbear, I stayed and I am glad I did.

The spirit of the American land lives through me and I through it. “You can hear it in my accent when I talk” croons Sting in his tune Englishman in New York. This is true. My voice tends to combine nasal Chicago drawl, 1980s slang, and various intonations from midcentury musical theater films that both my parents and I grew up with. I know the trees here, I am familiar with the seasonal patterns, and I know perennials from annuals. I know what can only be started from root division and what can be sown from seed. When I go on my long, solitary walks through the local forest and prairie preserves of which we have a great wealth here due to a good Park District, it is always a communion with old and dear friends. When you live in a place long enough, assimilation is far deeper than simple physical uptake of local resources into bodily matter. The land is no longer separate from me as I perceived it growing up, back when I considered moving far away. I cannot run away because I am the prairie. I am also whatever the prairie has had to suffer: highways, strip malls, subdivisions, McMansions, and displacement. We shoulder these burdens together, the prairie and I. We know that like any given set of circumstances or bodies, they are only temporary.

The Spirit of the People

I love the American people. I am proud to be an American. America is a big place: expansive, gregarious, and Jupiterian. Largeness becomes largesse. Americans have space in which to roll around and be themselves. This is a place where you can practice an obscure, fringe religion — in my case American Revival Druidry — and be left alone to mind your own business. This air of independence permeates America and every thing and person in it, bringing with it a strange brew of jollity and pragmatism. American people are hilarious, or at least I find them to be hilarious. When French pickpockets attempted to steal from American tourists at the Paris 2024 Olympics, they were met with an array of pranks and instant karma. Several pickpockets got owned by exploding dummy wallets; supposedly there were severe injuries that required hospitalization. One long, tall Texan yeeted a French pickpocket down a flight of stairs, again landing the would-be thief in the hospital. American are not passive victims who sit idly by while bad things happen to them. This is why I was glad the term “patriot” came into vogue during the proto-Communist Covid-19 scourge. At first, the term implied Americanness but soon came to represent proud nationalism displayed for any given country. Communism is an astral pyramid that regularly yields the opposite of what it promises. Instead of ensuring prosperity and necessary wealth for the common folk, it enriches and empowers a tiny handful of supreme leaders via unearned wealth. In brief, under communism, the common folk starve and/or are thrown in gulags.

America was not as prone to the communist astral pyramid of Covid-19 hysteria because there were too many people already infected by the spirit of independence. Those people saw the ruse for what it was and called BS. Covidiotarianism did not achieve its final form in the US because too many were willing to construct and utilize underground freedom networks to go around the oppressors. Too many of us promoted freedom-loving businesses, churches, grocery stores, doctors offices, schools, theaters, and restaurants on the down low. Too many owners of too many places were happy to ignore the threats of commie enforcers and snitches. Too many of us, myself included, were willing to die upon the hill of remaining free of so-called MRNA vaccines. The result of these small decisions was a significant number of “mind your own business” alliances that made it impossible for Big Brother Mao to get significant traction, especially outside of leftist cities.

The average American is friendly, and I would argue Americans are friendlier to strangers than the denizens of any other nation. They are more likely to help a stranger and do good solely for the sake of doing good. Perhaps this is why it cuts so deep when hordes of illegal immigrants are dumped in our cities and towns. Americans naturally want to help our brothers and sisters, but when a Venezuelan gang takes over an apartment building or when 3000 Mauritanians move to a tiny town of 2500 and then refuse to pay taxes to boot, it abuses and perverts the natural American instinct to extend a helping hand.  Nevertheless, most Americans cannot help their own drive to help. We continue to hold out hope our government and elites will stop or at least slow down their efforts to hijack and murder our good graces.

American Creativity

The combination of a big, all-encompassing space and a tendency to promote a mind-your-own business attitude yields a predictable result: creativity. I am a strange, creative person. I have never done psychedelics and I stick to single glasses of wine all of once a week because the last thing I need is to be more creative. I have had to enforce boundaries upon my own creativity because my cup runneth over: I gave away all of my craft supplies because between writing, composing and arranging music, and teaching, I simply don’t have the time to make a pair of earrings or a plant hanger. I am grateful to have been born in America because my creativity is accepted and encouraged here. There are plenty of people I can talk to who also write independently, make and arrange music, and who own and operate self-made small businesses like I do. Creativity is normal here, and it is not the new normal. I suspect it has been like this since the time before Native Americans traversed the Alaskan land bridge.

Despite its copious faults, American pop culture experienced a golden age of creativity that lasted from 1930 - 2000 and spawned entire genres of art and fiction. American cinema was so powerful during that era, Hollywood has spent nearly 30 years rehashing and recycling every theme and story from those halcyon days. Hollywood lost its quintessential Americanness at the flip of the millennium, when it became excruciatingly clear that pleasing the ghoulish censors of communist China and making cheddar on brand names were far more important than originality or storytelling. In the vacuum left behind by Hollywood’s abdication of the story in favor of THE MESSAGE flooded a new wave of independent, small time creators. Now that Hollywood gatekeepers have finally begun to lose their stranglehold, who knows what art forms will emerge from the American lands and their spirits?

The Food

The reason why so many Americans are pudgy (present company included!) is because the food here is amazing. My own backyard is so fertile, I grow lettuce, peppers, and zucchini without remedying the soil. America is a large, fertile breadbasket. For now, even the Derp State/Blackrock interlopers have not been able to take that away. American food features astonishing variation as the innate result of many cultures landing in the same place. What is called a melting pot should actually be called a weird pantry. Nobody is forced to melt here. At this very moment, I can travel fewer than 30 miles in any direction and eat authentic cuisines from Burma, North India, South India, China, the Philippines, Thailand, Japan, various regions of Mexico, and specific European countries such as Greece, Ireland, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, or Italy. Authentic world cuisines are just the beginning — if I don’t mind a little improvisational cooking, I can obtain a staggering variety of burgers, pizza, appetizers, snacks, soups, and desserts. I have choices that would have turned Roman emperors green with envy. I am in a fortunate, somewhat self-made position when it comes to food and avoiding obesity: I have been a for-the-animals vegan since 2010 and I am not a woman of means. Spending $50 on a single meal and drinks even once a week is not an option for me if I want to afford groceries, transportation, and housing. Even with my severe limits, I still eat extremely well because, well… America.

As we pitch headlong into what could be another dark and troubled political/economic era, I would like to remind everyone to stop and smell the roses, even if there are precious few of them. America is great and beautiful. It is also horrible and awful. The same things are true of other homelands. Spirits of place are complicated, much like the humans who inhabit them. May you gain the courage to recognize and appreciate the good in your own homeland, and may it return the favor by recognizing and appreciating the good within you.