Anyway shoutout to birthright citizenship. Also shoutout to all forms of naturalization. The egalitarian promise of America has been that if you want to be American, you can be American. Not a politically neutral promise, but not a universally sinister one. You got Emma Lazarusās poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Come on over. You can be an American. Anyone can be an American. And every American is the same kind of American. At our best we make that process (legally, culturally, logistically, psychologically, ethically) easier. At our worst we make it harder. Often weāre doing both at once.
My grandparents after immigrating didnāt consider themselves Korean-American or French-American. They were Americans. That they were also Korean and French was important but unrelated. Their American identity needed no hyphen or asterix next to it because the idea of being American included the idea thatād youād been somewhere else before and you brought that place with you. At one point, we moved away from the melting pot metaphor into the like āGreat American Mixed Salad,ā where instead of melding into one big soup, all the ingredients remain distinct but come together to form a unified taste. I get the metaphor, I like the metaphorāI think itās weaker poetically but thatās a separate matterābut thereās something beautiful about the melding. Our ingredients come together to make something new. You can scoop out the chunks you donāt like, but youāll never undo what they did to the broth.
I know the dark side of everything Iām saying. I know the promise hasnāt been kept. I know the promise in and of itself is horrific to some people, the great American conglomerate swallow up everything in its path. I know this land wasnāt some terra nullius tabula rasa for us to take and mold as we pleased, no harm, no foul. I know, I know, I know, I promise that I know. I also think there are ways these ideas can and have been beautiful, meaningful, important, aspirational in the best ways, ideals that guide the actual nation we have towards that North Star of a more perfect union. You can love a place without excusing it. Those ideas can survive people trying to torture them to death. Abolitionists were as American as slavers, and later we enshrined in the constitution that those weād enslaved were just as American too, and we used that amendment to outlaw racial segregation in public schools, to legalize interracial marriage and later gay marriage, to affirm the federal right to abortion. Until we took that last one away. I know.
Nothing gets to be simple, and no work is ever done. Find me a nation where that isnāt the case and Iāll move there. Until then, Iāve got a date with 100 mg of weed, the pirated Hamilton pro shot, and a bowl of vanilla ice cream with strawberries in it. The ice cream should also have blueberries technically if I wanted the full red, white, and blue experience, but no one in this house was enthusiastic about blueberries so we simply didnāt get them. We get to decide that the America sundae tastes like. I canāt believe thatās the note Iām gonna end on. Iām just so psyched to eat that sundae. You decide how much of a metaphor that is. Happy fourth, to those who celebrate.
