America

I’ve been thinking about this piece for ages. From sitting on the grass in the mews, drinking mojitos jam-packed with Sara’s homegrown mint, to here, in the centuries-old walls of York library, all these weeks later. Maybe I’ve been thinking about how to write it for 26 years. How do I sum up this place? This America. This massive, sprawling land of contradictions. Full of beauty and hate. Desperate poverty and untold riches. Land of the persecuted minority turned enslaver.

I have tried to live my life here by the ideals of America, if not the reality. 

I have experienced the deep joys of this place. Picking fat Michigan blueberries with my curly-haired toddler. Sniffing a ponderosa pine searching for notes of caramel and coffee. Protesting hand-in-hand with two old ladies. Women who have seen this flavour of oppression on another continent and came here expecting better. Giving my time for free at schools, classrooms, refugees’ homes, political campaigns. It all felt deeply American. I honestly don’t think I would have done any of those things in other countries. 

So, how do I balance that with this deep streak of cruelty running through the country? The profound disdain for the weak, the poor, the disabled, the other. How could a country of immigrants turn their back on the very people searching for that same thing? Perhaps I can write it off as human nature the world over. Hurt humans hurt humans. But this particular contempt for the poor strikes me as a distinctly American trait. Why, of all the rich, western countries, is it unique in its lack of social services? Its wildly expensive healthcare system tied to your labor. Its tolerance of homelessness and hungry children. Its lack of public transport. The solutions are clear and not terribly expensive, but we’ve turned away from them time and time again. Why? Americans hate poor people. Even poor Americans hate poor people. And throw race in there to really draw some stark lines between people. Poor Asians hate poor Hispanics hate poor Black people. Our lives might suck, but at least we’re better than them.

I think, in a way, it does come back to the origins of the country. The land and its people exist for us to extract, destroy, maim, and control, in the name of making a profit. And they did. They took it all. And there was just SO MUCH. So much space, so much money to make, so much freedom to do what you wanted, to human beings, to the land. Barely any pesky laws or regulations. Manifest destiny. God had willed it. God wanted you to be rich. You were the chosen ones. Better than the subhumans who worked your fields or roamed the prairies. And the more money and land you had, the better you were, the more you deserved, the more value you had as a human being, the more ease of life you discovered and deserved, goddamnit. The ultimate capitalism. There was none of that landed gentry bullshit of the old country; here you were a self-made man through and through. And if people try to tell you that you made your riches through exploitation and unearned privilege, well fuck them; they’re jealous/woke/weak pick your adjective.

And we can flip that around, too. If you are not wealthy in this country, you’ve done something wrong. Anyone can make it here, so why didn’t you? And, you know what? Because you’ve fucked up so badly and decided to be poor, we’re going to make your life extra hard. We will make deliberate policy decisions at a state and federal level to make sure you feel that disdain every day. 

Your neighborhoods will be more polluted, with more trash and less green space for your kids to play in. There’ll be more traffic there, fewer sidewalks, more potholes. You’ll need a car, for sure. And if you’re young or can’t afford a reliable one, you’ll need to take multiple buses to work that take hours and drop you far from where you need to be, where you cross busy roads with few crosswalks dodging cars the height of an adult man determined to run you down for sport. And as you wait for the bus in the blinding heat or the heavy rain or the spitting snow, there’ll be no shelter or even a place to sit down because you’re poor and your life deserves to be shit because you’ve made the choices that put you there. Which choices? To live in a neighborhood you can afford, which means the school you go to (paid for by local property taxes, unlike in other countries) is shittier than the ones in richer neighborhoods where they have more teachers, better resources, more counselors, and special ed. If the property taxes in the rich neighborhoods aren’t enough to pay for those things, the parents will step in. Parents who don’t have to take a bus to two jobs have time to volunteer, read in the classroom, and fundraise at glitzy auctions. 

And you suckers will vote for it every time because there’s always someone below you. Someone worse off that you can turn your hatred on. 

I sometimes think that Trump is the most American thing to happen to America.