I moved to the United States to pursue a master’s in journalism and cultural studies during a challenging time. Not metaphorically or poetically, but literally. Insurrectionists stormed the capital as the world was still reeling, barely starting to heal from a global pandemic. As I was thrown into the depths of American culture, a culture foreign to me, the country attempted to recover from a first Trump term under an imperfect president. Of course, no president is perfect, but this one was so obviously flawed that his age overshadowed his otherwise monumental achievements. Elon Musk became the world’s richest person, while income inequality rose for the first time since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. More than 230 people were killed in shootings over a single Fourth of July weekend.
Meanwhile, I was absorbing American literary history like a sponge until soaked through and through. We read David Halberstam’s portrait of a changing American landscape in The Fifties, Joan Didion’s reflections on counterculture and the American West in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic and Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation. As I sped through the American cultural canon in a mere matter of months, the America I was working so hard to understand was changing right before my eyes.
Five years later, the picture for my personal anniversary, which coincides with the country’s 250th, is bleak: unchecked executive power is wreaking havoc on America’s frail democracy. Extreme polarization has permeated not only its politics, but also its cultural ecosystem. Voting rights are under sustained and strategic attack, reproductive rights have been decimated for one third of women in the country, and censorship has soared, including book bans and suppression of the press. And the land of immigrants has turned violently against a cornerstone of its professed character at its founding.
This particular reversal creates a well of grief so deep that it is hard to overstate. What I see, as an outsider, which Americans, I believe, are sometimes unable to, is the gap between what America believes about itself and what it actually is. Its people’s suffering is unnecessary, its patriotism at times egotistic. James Baldwin said it before me, and said it better: loving a country, or really any living thing, means insisting on criticizing it perpetually.
The United States of America are monumental. They are ambitious. They are unstable. America remains the leader of the free world, yet in some ways, one of the most unfree places on planet earth. Maybe where the United States of America lives is in that contradiction. Maybe it will never get out of it. Maybe that’s the point.
And yet. Zoom out further, and something else comes into focus.
The rich are getting richer in Europe, too. The breakdown of democratic institutions happens in real-time, in places that should know better and in places that never have. Our societies are increasingly violent, unequal, deadly. The USA did not create these world problems. They simply show up louder, larger, in high contrast.
The extraordinary achievement remains. A Constitution that inspired modern liberation discourse, despite its struggle to uphold its own standards. A land mass this vast—3.8 million square miles of monumental landscapes—held together by one government that struggles to hold together its immeasurably divergent parts. A tapestry of religions, cultures, cuisines, and languages who each and every day, struggle to make it in a country that does not make it easy to even barely survive. But survived they have. People are better off today than they were fifty, let alone 250, years ago. This story is one that starts and stops, peaks up and falls down. Layered, complicated, long, hard.
It feels almost mandatory, in a reflection piece like this, for such a titanic celebration as 250 years of independence, to end on a positive note. I don’t think that I can do that conclusively.
Grief births creativity and change. I can only hope that that is what is on the horizon.
Some days, at sunset, I decide to bike home over the Williamsburg Bridge instead of taking the train. The familiar skyline builds up slowly as you climb the steep hill towards the peak: the river, the building lights that slowly light up in the falling night that make the city look like dots on a Monet painting. It moves me, still.
My first week in New York, in the middle of frazzled apartment hunting, I went to the MoMA on my own. Walking past a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, tears welled up that I could not hold back. Tears of wonderment at the opportunity to be here. Despite its many faults, here is now my home. A home that feels precarious, dangerous, difficult, constantly under threat, but a home nevertheless. To feel these feelings is to grow. I have grown immensely as I built my life in America. America needs to confront these feelings to continue doing the same.
I call this my love story with America. I know how that sounds. I’m suspicious of love stories. As Laura Kipnis put it in Against Love, love stories at times conceal more than they reveal. Love can hide practicality and obligation. It is layered, complicated, long, hard. So is mine, especially today.
