Part of Me (Grew Up in Ohio)
Amma, Anu, and me at Riverpark Apartments in Columbus, Ohio (where I grew up)
The America I love feels like it’s slipping away. I used to look up to America. In a world where people got taken from their homes, tortured and imprisoned – there was America. In a world where nations spit on each other and cast out their own citizens – there was America. For someone international and confused like me, that was a place I could call home. America was a place of sanity and calm in a turbulent world.
Today it is the center of the storm. Now America has Guantanamo and Abu Gharib. Now ‘liberal’ and ‘French’ are insults, and keeping gays out is something to rally around. Like Israel, America has responded to a threat with nationalism and fear of the other. I am international, and I will always be an other. Am I American anymore? This is the slow acidic drip of cynicism, and I think it’s giving me an ulcer.
Nice site, until I got to this page at least.
To answer your question, no you are not an American. You are a radical chic white-washed asshole.
What I love about America is its freedom and openness, but now people like REM seem to think crushing that is somehow patriotic. It’s not. That attitude is really much closer to the facism, communism, and Islamic totalitarianism that America has fought against. The idea that dissent and free speech make you ‘not an American’.
In the America I love you are free to be a radical chic whatever, unlike Saudi Arabia or North Korea where everyone has to toe the line. That people like REM think they’re doing their country a service is what hurts worst of all. If the fight is for freedom, then REM is aiding and abetting the enemy.