The “United” States of America?
“I am American.” It is a simple phrase really. Yet it seems that it is becoming increasingly rare that someone utters this phrase in such a simplistic fashion. Instead it is ever more popular to qualify ones American heritage. “I am ____ -American.” A rich American, a poor American; white American, Hispanic American; Christian American, Muslim American. . . which takes precedence, the noun or the adjective? The noun implies unity, while the adjective illustrates difference. It is these qualifiers that people attach to being American bring us apart and separate us into groups. This separation is causing a growing fear in our country. Specification implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority breeds intolerance. American will either fall because of our differences or rise in spite of them. If we are to survive as a nation united it is imperative that we acknowledge our differences for what they are and then focus on what it is that we have in common, so that we may exist united as one indivisible nation.
Fear is a common aspect of human nature and without a common foreign enemy to unite us; this fear must find a target. For almost fifty years, Americans had an enemy in which to place their fears. But with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, that enemy vanished and our fear was left without a home. With no place for our nations fears to be directed, Americans began to look at each other as suspect, setting class against class, group against group, person against person. As President Lincoln once stated, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” When we, as a people, focus on our differences more than our commonalities, groups begin to form. People divide themselves along party lines and a distance is created between them. When something is held at a distance it becomes increasingly vague until it becomes alien and unknown. People fear what they do not understand and what they do not know. Inversely, when people fear things, they wish to distance themselves from that fear as much as possible. This completes an endlessly perpetual cycle in which we fear that which is distant and strange and pushes away and estranges ourselves from that which we fear. It is this that makes the use of fear as a political tool unfortunately so effective.
When politicians use these differences to polarize their constituencies, it inevitably causes a divide among the populace. The satirist Lewis Lapham goes so far as to state:
The strategies of division sell newspapers and summon votes, and to the man who would be king (or president or governor) the popular hatred of government matters less than the atmosphere of resentment in which people fear and distrust one another. Democratic politics trades in only two markets ----the market in expectation and the market in blame. A collapse in the former engenders a boom in the latter (Lapham, 231-232).
The politician with an ulterior motive will, given the opportunity, take full advantage of these differences, which we have created between ourselves. Too often the claims they make are based not on evidentiary logic, but on conjecture. These claims seem to be presented in the form of logical fallacies. An appeal to fear seems to have been popular in this last election season (i.e., propaganda). This fear exists, and is exploitable, because people identify themselves as part of a sub-group of American culture first and as an American second; because that person is not a part of our group, we believe they are different and we fear them. Fear, however, is not the only reason for the partitioning of our society.
People split off into sub-sections of society for a variety of reasons. Blame is another example. If some aspect of society has failed, people require a scapegoat. Leaders and politicians have taken advantage of this throughout history. The most horrific example was when Adolf Hitler placed the blame for Germany’s economic squalor on the shoulders of the so-called “undesirables”. The same can be seen, to a lesser extent, in America. Our nation’s economic woes are blamed on any number of groups. Republicans blamed Democrats, Democrats blamed Republicans. The rich placed the blame on the poor for leeching off of society, while the poor blamed the rich for taking advantage of them and their situation. The bottom line though, is that people identify themselves by whichever qualifier they deem appropriate because there is the need to set themselves apart from other groups. This differentiation gives people someone to point their fingers at.
Fear and blame ---these are easy. It is comfortable to point out how everyone is different. It is not so easy, nor so comfortable, to point out how those “other people” are similar. John F. Kennedy demonstrated what makes America great when he said:
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
We must accept our differences and focus on our similarities, not because they are easy, but because, like going to the moon, they are the hard thing to do, the right thing to do. America is by no means perfect, but there is one thing that makes us who we are. It’s the one thing that the Irish-American, the Jewish-American, the German-American, the gay American, the poor American, and the rich American all have in common; we are Americans.
The author Anna Quindlen discusses one of America’s greatest qualities when she writes:
. . .the overwhelming majority of those surveyed by the National Opinion Research Center agreed with this statement: “the U.S. is a unique country that stands for something special in the world” One of the things that it stands for is a vexing notion that a great nation can consist entirely of refugees from other nations, that people of different, even warring religions and cultures can live, if not side by side, than on either side of the country’s Chester Avenues (243).
Despite all of America’s diversity and de facto segregation it seems that, as a nation, there is still a large degree of unity. We are akin to a group of siblings. While these siblings may fight against one another on a regular basis, when presented with an outside enemy they will band together to form an alliance that seems to know no rival. It is this duality that both Quindlen and Lapham seem to address in their writings.
In his writing “Who and What Is American?” Lapham states:
. . . we can speak plainly about our differences only if we know and value what we hold in common. Like the weather and third-rate journalism, bigotry in all its declensions is likely to be with us for a long time . . . , but unless we can draw distinctions and make jokes about our racial or cultural baggage, the work of our shared imagination must vanish in the mist of lies (240-241).
In essence, if we as a country are to ever move forward and progress as a whole, we must come to terms with who we are as individuals. There must be common ground on which we can stand and share our differences. If America as a nation is to continue we cannot allow, “that the left side of the hyphen ... would overwhelm the right (Qindlen,243).” The black, the Irish, the Jewish, etc.; these qualifiers cannot become more important than the noun that they modify. While, admittedly one’s heritage is important and should never be forgotten, it is ultimately the noun that is the subject and not the adjective. If the United States of America is to remain united, the noun must never become subjugated in the hearts of the American people.
Some would also question whether or not the Unites States has become a successful country because of all the bigotry and intolerance that exists within its borders. However, as backwards as it may seem, it is what allows for the presence of this bigotry and intolerance that attracts people to this country. Arguably, the most profound reason people come to the U.S. is for freedoms that we as Americans enjoy. Many of the immigrants who have come to America have done so to seek refuge from persecution, be it religious, political, racial, or some other form. They came here to be what they couldn’t be in their home country. The freedoms that allow Americans to freely practice their religion of choice, identify and support the political movement of their choice, and be whomever they choose to be, also allows people to be bigots. America is by no means perfect, but the fact that we can live together as a people, free to express ourselves in whatever reasonable fashion we choose is what makes America a success (what is deemed “reasonable” is up for debate and is a topic for another venue). We continue to adhere to the values that have brought us this far and make America “something special in the world”(Quindlen, 243).
There is no doubt that America lives holding on to a very fragile balance between unity and individuality. They are both highly valued ideals among Americans. If we, as Americans, cannot come to terms with our differences, accept each other for who we are, and then find some common ground, then we as a nation are destined to suffer. We must either learn to thrive in spite of our differences or we will fall as a result of them.
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