Becoming American
An Outsider's Perspective
Let me make it clear that in some sense I am indeed an American and have always been one. I am a natural born U.S. citizen and have never held any other citizenship. The same goes for my parents and grand parents. Except for my week–long trip through Amsterdam and Greece in 2001 and viewing a film at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., I have lived my entire existence in U.S. territory. In confusing my pronouns and identifying with the Greeks as described in the last section, it was not my citizenship at stake, it was my societal belonging or cultural identity. It had to do with discovering or at minimum rediscovering my Americanism. So I asked myself whether I had begun to adopt a culture by decidedly pushing aside one already in place or in order to fulfill something that had lapsed into deficiency.
There were things about my upbringing which I consider now to be a bit outside modern American culture. A cross–stitch which still hangs in my parents' home capsulates a lot of what my childhood taught me about how to live. It reads “Use it up. Wear it out. Make it do. Do without.” Unfortunately I think this seeped into too many areas of my life with too much sticking power. I realized that I had taken these words to heart holding myself back from at least some of the richness of life available to me. I had made a cross–stitch of my own which read “Take what no one else wants. Find a use for it. Learn to love it. Be happy right where you are.”
Perhaps some would debate whether the actual cross–stitch is un–American; I doubt any could argue very successfully in favor of mine. Some, including myself, can see how the early settlers and frontiersmen had a difficult life, living at times solely on their abilities to stretch their resources to almost unbelievable degrees, but we are talking about modern America. Too much of Modern American culture in my view says “Take what you want. Build to suit. Out with the old. In with the new.” If this seems cynical, then you can see why my cross–stitch stayed on the wall of my mind for so long. There was no attractive alternative before me—no incremental path from where I was to where I could be. It took the jolt of finding myself falling into another way of life—finding myself to be something else—for me to stop and see the life I was actually living, to realize that I was in a position where I had to Become American.