Being American By Meaning and Choice

Birth may give us a country, but we must decide what our national identity means

My American citizenship arrived by accident.

I was born on American soil to American parents. The law recognized me before I could recognize the country, much less decide what I owed it. Under the Fourteenth Amendment, that was enough to make me an American.

Others become Americans by choice and fortune. They spend years becoming lawful residents, completing applications, submitting to interviews and examinations, and waiting to take an oath. Naturalization is a process, a dedicated choice. This year, some people who had already committed themselves to that process saw their citizenship applications abruptly paused because of where they came from.

But no matter how we acquire the legal identity, the law cannot tell us what being American is supposed to mean.

I grew up with the Pledge of Allegiance as a frequent, if not daily, occurrence. Schoolchildren have been performing versions of that ritual since 1892, but in my elementary years, the pledge was mostly meaningless to me. My peers and I were still learning what words like allegiance meant.

We performed an imitation of citizenship to satisfy the adults around us. We had some vague sense of pride in something we had no hand in building. Some of us tried to reconcile what we heard in one-day-a-week Sunday school about placing no allegiance before God with our five-day-a-week recitation toward a flag. Mostly, we said the words that sent smiles our way or relaxed the hands we feared.

The America presented to me outside the classroom was rough and physical. It wielded a large knife, a large gun, and mud-coated boots. It flew war machines overhead that inspired businessmen to crush their hats against their chests and bow their heads in reverence. It treated people who did not speak like us, act like us, or look like us with frivolous disregard at best.

I was a child who paid too much attention to the adults around me. I remember my mother quietly cursing the administration when gasoline reached $1.16 a gallon. At one of the few Scout meetings I attended, we watched news reports showing cruise missiles and aircraft carriers flexing American power somewhere in the Middle East, which I discovered meant the middle of the eastern hemisphere and not the middle of the East Coast. I sat through D.A.R.E. classes about the war on drugs. I read about the might and terror of nuclear weapons and learned that America had developed enough power to end much of the world.

This was the America offered to children of my generation: macho military might and meddlesome domestic interference. Freedom had been born from the end of a musket and preserved by ever-larger weapons. Government existed to organize violence and aim it at whatever threatened us, whether that meant drugs, foreign nations, or troublesome people at home.

And what a cheap cost of freedom! What a victory to be American!

When I entered high school, I joined the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. My mother had done the same and recommended it to me. It seemed obvious that I should join because I needed to learn to be even more American.

I was not a strong kid at fourteen, but I was smart. That meant I was always at risk of becoming either a tool or a punching bag for someone else. Perhaps discipline and service offered another possibility. If I could make myself more capable, more useful, and more American, maybe I could embrace that identity and become free.

I went all out and overboard.

I dug out my mother’s craft supplies and made red, white, and blue ornaments to gild nearly every surface of my room. Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” was on heavy rotation. I learned everything I could about nuclear weapons and submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for information about Army programs related to electromagnetic pulses. I learned to march. I learned to salute. My high school became an Honor Unit the first year we were eligible.

I was a proud American.

But that was such a thin veneer of America. It was the flag and the fight.

It took a few more years for something else I had been observing to snap into focus. America was not only the front line and the defenders on the wall. America was what life was like between the purple mountain majesties and the amber waves of grain.

It was less about our vaunted military than about the people at those gas pumps, like my mother, trying to reconcile freedom with the cost of living. It was what happened in homes, schools, workplaces, hospitals, fire stations, polling places, and town halls. America was not merely the force we could project beyond our borders. It was the life we made possible within them.

I had been an adult for just under two years when the worst terror attack to ever occur on American soil slammed onto every television and front page in the world. It was the latest in a long line of disasters I had noticed while growing up, but it was the first that made me care deeply about who the president was, what the government would do, and how we, my fellow Americans, would react.

I saw Americans extend their hands. Tens of thousands of people participated in rescue, recovery, feeding, sheltering, and relief work. The Red Cross response alone involved more than 57,000 volunteers and employees.

But we did not only extend our hands. We also closed our fists.

Muslim, Arab, Sikh, and South Asian Americans were attacked, threatened, and treated as foreign enemies in their own country. The Justice Department would eventually investigate more than 800 incidents involving violence, threats, vandalism, and arson. Fear became suspicion. Grief became permission. The same force-centered patriotism I had been taught as a child was used to decide who belonged, who should be watched, and who could be hurt.

I remember the talk of turning the Middle East into a glass wasteland in retaliation, a misinformed reference to unleashing our most fearsome weapons indiscriminately.

We could reach out, or we could lash out.

That was when my relationship with being American began to change. It could no longer be a child’s identity built from rote repetition, borrowed pride, and fascination with national force. I was a voting adult, young, able-bodied, and sharp-minded. I had some small hand in determining what America would mean.

Over the last twenty-five years, I have continued to decide that I will be an American.

It became a choice.

As I have learned more about the principles and people of this country, including the greatness of what we have been, what we are, and what we could still become, I have grown more troubled by the identities we place ahead of citizenship. I do not mean being a parent, sibling, spouse, friend, or member of a faith. I mean the identities of party, ideology, grievance, stereotype, and dysfunctional community.

When disaster or attack puts the question to us, we often rise to meet it. The danger is visible. The work is immediate. We remember that we need one another.

But when the threat is slower and more insidious, we retreat into our factions. When the question is control of the government, we cling to party. When immense wealth manipulates the levers of public power, we wear economic models like badges. When illness ravages individuals and communities, we cling to the image of the lone, rugged American who needs only a large knife, a large gun, and a flag to survive.

We have turned citizenship into something we inherit, an opinion we express, and a spectacle we watch. A recent Pew study found that only 9 percent of Americans belong to its most civically active group, while 62 percent are comparatively passive “Spectators” or disconnected “Outsiders.” But a common country must be commonly worked upon.

When I think about the worst days I have witnessed, the Americans I remember first are the ones with their hands outstretched.

They rev chainsaws to clear roads and sewing machines to make clothes. They register young and disenfranchised voters and help them understand civic life. They balance the books, clear the trash, plead the cases, perform CPR, or offer bottles of water to the people swinging hammers. More than half of Americans still report helping their neighbors informally.

This is what being American means to me now.

It is not blind pride in military might or a flag I had nothing to do with creating. It is lending my ears and my heart, my mind and my hands, my voice and my vote to my fellow Americans, and to anyone in need within my reach.

Perhaps that is why I was drawn into emergency management and public health. It was the most patriotic work I could reach for.

Perhaps it is also why I spend my free time on civic work: writing, organizing, listening, and now sitting down with people for Among Americans. These conversations are another way of asking what kind of country we are making and what we owe the people making it alongside us.

I did nothing to earn the citizenship I was born with. Adulthood gave me the chance to decide what I would do with it.

I was born American by accident. The American I become is by choice.