Last week, my grandmother became an official United States citizen. The long process was finally complete, after loads of paperwork, questions, and interviews - she made it to the oathtaking ceremony and my family as so proud of her. She was nervous, but we were excited. Donald Trump couldn’t deport her! Awesome! (Not that she was illegal or anything, but still fun to say anyway.)
Everyone got dressed. My grandmother wore one of her nice blouses and a cute shade of orange lipstick. We got into the car and headed to Goshen, leaving early to make sure we didn’t miss anything. All was well, but we got lost trying to find the place we had to be because I suppose that the courthouse was being renovated. We got worried when we thought the ceremony was being held in a prison. Nope, it was the building next door. But we laughed and carried on - it was grandma’s big day after all.
When we entered, the staff had us sign a few papers. My mom helped facilitate the language barrier. We all took our seats in the small auditorium and felt lucky that we could find a good spot on the side not too far from grandma’s seat in the center section. They wanted us there at 10 am. We and plenty others got there at 9:30, to be sure. My brother and I sent little smiles and cheers our grandmother’s way, and yeah, she was still feeling the nerves. But in a few moments it would be over, we thought.
At around 10:15, we overheard a British-accented woman disappointingly explain to her supporting guests that the actual ceremony apparently didn’t start until 11:30. The staff just wanted to use this time to finish up some paperwork, and she told them that it was okay if they left - they had better things to do and she didn’t expect them to wait that long for her. They said they would go get breakfast and come back. Our family stayed. It was for grandma.
When 11:30 finally came, the county clerk shared with us a few words on how beautiful the ceremony was going to be, all the while introducing some of the other individuals who would speak. She spoke casually, though, about how pleasant this one staff member was, and how the judge had such a great sense of humor (it didn’t show).They were obviously friends. Then a woman from Rockland spoke to us on the importance of organ donation, and how as new citizens, the members of the audience should totally sign up as donors because we could save our fellow citizens’ lives just like these other speakers who would be dead otherwise. Organ donation’s a big deal, and I know what kind of difference it makes to those in need. I didn’t know what it had to do with becoming a citizen, but I didn’t care. But I also didn’t know how large of a theme it was going to be throughout the ceremony. Did you know that New York is ranked last in organ donations in the whole country? I do.
We sat through speakers coming in late and not knowing where to sit on the stage. Reminder after reminder how good citizens are active in the community and donate organs. Awkward, self-congratulatory, middle-aged white people banter. And oh yeah, this is about you guys not us congratulations to the new citizens for joining “the greatest country on the face of the earth.”
And with the most anti-climactic transition into a long winded and inelegant run through of the names of new citizens receiving their certificates, everyone in the audience just seemed pretty done. Admittedly, I didn’t know what to expect from a citizenship oath taking ceremony, but to me it felt like I was watching a poorly prepped middle school assembly. Nothing about it felt special, regardless of how many times the speakers told us it would be the most important day of these people’s lives. And honestly, it felt like they weren’t even taking it that seriously themselves.
So of course, in the way that I do, I make a stupid sarcastic remark to my family about how - Great! These people can be ignored and have their votes locked away just like everyone else. (Obviously, I’m still upset about some of the recent events that have occurred in the U.S. these past few months - the many accounts of proven election fraud definitely one of them.) In response to my rude comment, my family met me with some heated backlash that, no doubt, was going to be continued in the car. Okay fine. Wrong place, wrong time, understandable. But with hundreds of thousands of voters purged from election databases, with more than a million votes uncounted in California alone, and with almost all of mainstream media deciding who the democratic nominee would be before the day before the last major primaries - don’t tell me that I don’t know what I’m saying.
America isn’t that great. And that ceremony served as a perfect first example.
As happy as I am that my grandmother is officially a United States citizen, I just don’t believe that the United States actually is the “greatest country on the face of the earth” right now. In fact, in some cases, I believe that that very idea, that mindset of “American Exceptionalism”, has become pretty toxic. I mean - that ceremony alone was just an awful way to bring in new people for the rest of the country to hate and blame for its problems. (Oh, was I rude again? My bad.)
Like always, I have a lot to say as to why I think the US is not objectively the greatest country in the world. And before you ask me who is, I don’t have an answer. But for one of the world’s leading nations (so yes, I understand my parents’ upset because no doubt they saw a better life here than in the Philippines) who parades itself for its freedom, its openness, its opportunity and its red, white and blue starred and striped bald eagles that shoot fireworks from their feathers and poop out apple pie - I don’t see how modern history shows us living up to those expectations. Despite mass shootings and large numbers of gun related deaths, we’ve become a country that values one’s freedom to effortlessly shoot down a room full of people more than a woman’s freedom to make decisions for her own body. We’ve grown to hate the immigrants that built our country and once made us famous for being “The Great Melting Pot”. And though opportunities may seem aplenty, they are much harder fought for by those considered different, even if those people were born and raised here. I can go on about all the problems our massively surveillanced, politically divided, war-obsessed nation has, I really can. But with the giant mess of a campaign season this past year has been, I’m sure everyone has already heard that kind of rant in some shape or form. And that’s not the point I wanna make anyway.
Instead, I wanna talk about how dangerous that idea of American Exceptionalism is growing to be. I wanna talk about how believing that we’re this awesome heroic anomaly in human history, believing that the US was destined to lead the world in molding it in our image, and believing that we’re just too great to be in the wrong, has become almost an excuse for our very real issues. How, really, maybe a little humility could do our country some good.
Last week, I watched Bill O’Reilly go on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" and talk up the shooting in Orlando as an attack caused by Islamic State and a reason to declare war, amongst other cringe-worthy things. Colbert asked him about perspective, and how it doesn’t have to be framed in that way, seeing as the shooting illustrated what can happen when individuals have easy access to assault rifles. Neither of these perspectives discussed the shooting as an issue stemming from gay prejudice, like several New Yorker articles that I’ve read, but in any case, O’Reilly made a lot of statements that not only made my skin crawl, but also came off as incredibly narrow-minded. Despite the shooter, Omar Mateen, not having any real connection to ISIS to be found, he simply dismisses him as “evil” just like the “ISIS ideology” that needs to be “destroyed”. He denounces any mental illness Mateen may have had as an “excuse.” And even though Colbert poked a giant hole in O’Reilly’s logic that the shooting should be a cause for declaration, almost all of what he said just became a matter of the US going to war to fix all of our gun and shooting problems and my brain was melting as I watched.
I am not going to say that the Orlando shooting wasn’t as bad as it was, and I am not going to say that ISIS isn’t as bad as it is - I don’t want to make light of either. But what pissed me off so much in watching was O’Reilly’s focus, that our country’s new evil foe must be the cause of something so horrific. How could we, the heroes of this story, possibly be to blame? It couldn’t be our obsession with guns because guns are so great and if Mateen really wanted to do it, it would have happened regardless, right? It couldn’t be our own culture’s stigma towards LGBT (or even Muslim stigma towards being LGBT, for that matter) because even though Mateen was born and raised in New York, his identity as Muslim immediately meant that ISIS was involved, right? And because the United States couldn’t possibly be anything but in the complete and total moral right in any situation, we as the world’s leader must use our power to destroy the evil that lurks beyond our borders! Just like the Nazis! We destroyed the Nazis!
I’m sorry, but I call bullshit. The US has some real issues, and calling it something else just keeps us from dealing with them. We’re not perfect. We’re not always the heroes.
I can’t help but find something intrinsically wrong with the idea that a realistically flawed entity - an individual, a group, a nation - must always be in the moral right. But that seems to be what American Exceptionalism wants to tell us. We were the ragtag underdog victors of the Revolutionary War who fought against British oppression! We’re the reason the Allies beat the Nazis in World War 2! We beat the Communists because our Capitalism was just awesome and better! But then you learn that the conditions the British held against us were actually pretty reasonable. That the Soviet Union played a HUGE role in defeating Nazi Germany in Europe, while the US focused primarily on the Japanese. And that it wasn’t necessarily American Capitalism that ended Communism, but that Communism mostly ended itself.
But it doesn’t stop there. If it did, I probably wouldn’t be writing this. And yet here I am.
We’re not racist, those people are just lazy, violent, drug dealing rapists! We’re not LGBT-phobic, they’re all just perverts who want to attack us in the bathroom! We don’t have a gun problem, it’s the criminal’s fault! It’s not us, it’s them!
We can’t be evil because ISIS is evil, and we’re not ISIS. Is that the logic here? When does American Exceptionalism even talk about slavery, genocide, the KKK and the Westboro Baptist Church?
And are we that arrogant? How can we look at ISIS and see pure evil, when in our own backyards we experience corruption, bigotry and oppressive authority? It’s that arrogance that only adds to how stupid we must look to the rest of the world, like little kids pointing fingers at one another. Except instead of fingers, they’re legal firearms.
I’m tired of listening to people like Bill O’Reilly and that one Trump voter who told me that my education was socialist propaganda talk about these other issues that just try to take moral responsibility away from the faults of American culture - because it’s not always them, it’s us too. Statements like those suggesting that Omar Mateen was just pure Islamic State evil only keep us from acknowledging our own country’s problems with gun violence, gay discrimination, Muslim discrimination and so on. So how can we possibly solve our nation’s flaws when we refuse to recognize them?
As much as I complain about the many issues with the United States, I’ll be the first to admit that - even though it’s probably not the greatest country on the face of the earth - I still can’t imagine myself living anywhere else but here, in the state of New York, which admittedly is probably not even the greatest state either. But this country and this state is my home, which is why I’m still proud to see my grandmother become a citizen. And I would like to imagine that they both can get better one day. The first step is figuring out what’s wrong. The second is being mature enough to take responsibility for it. Then maybe one day we can rightfully call ourselves the greatest again. The kind of country that new immigrants can really be proud of joining.
(But seriously though, that ceremony was awful. And I’m recognizing it as awful.)
