Where are you (coming) from?

When it’s not enough to be born in or love the USA.

The hardest question to answer is simple. “Where are you from?” I never intended to spend so much time focused on defending democracy when I grew up; I had been under the impression that our freedom stateside was a given.

I was wrong.

You see, I was raised overseas, in England, to be precise, and I had thought I’d write someday about being between cultures, because England and America are very different places, as much as they have similarities. 

I came of age after the fall of the Berlin wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union heading into the fall of the twin towers and the resultant erosion of American freedom. I was 9 in 1989; I was 21 in 2001. 

I can remember the genocides in the middle of Europe, the Rwandan genocide with bodies stacked up in churches, the apparent failure of democracy and freedom to counteract tribalism and cynical propaganda. 

I also remember studying the Holocaust as history, not quite grasping it as something my grandfather photographed personally, as a GI. That realization came later, more recently, as similarities to our time became apparent. 

The increasing fear of discussing how far Hitler would go, is the same dynamic in play in American media and families right now; there is a sense that saying what is happening out loud may make it come true, and yet, it already is. 

They wanted to kill Americans on January 6th. We are there. 

So my naive earlier dreams of blogging to raise awareness of Adult Third Culture (Kid) issues, working through that difficult question of provenance, for someone raised between countries in this increasingly radicalized world, are somewhat faded of late. I had simply wanted to explain myself to a world that doesn’t seem to welcome differences in its subcultures. And it is getting worse.

Instead of being able to process that personal grief, cruel attacks, on people like me who don’t fit, have only increased exponentially after 9/11. The people who thought themselves the most free, when revealed as vulnerable like poorer nations, did not react with strength and dignity; they inevitably turned to hate.

I had thought if we could talk about it, things would improve. I still, naively, believe.

I believed in the goodness of most Americans. I just thought they were uninformed and couldn’t be blamed, because they hadn’t had my experiences or opportunities. But increasingly, I tend to believe that those who have turned to hate, who have been influenced far too easily towards smear campaigns of their innocent neighbors-doctors, teachers, librarians, racial or sexual minorities…, are really just narcissists who don’t deserve to be reasoned with, only rebuked and left to stew in their fear and hate, alone. 

The thing is, Americans used to be generous, kind, caring people, with an optimism that didn’t waver even when facing adversity. Our best days were when we faced down the Nazis, or in the aftermath of terror, in our sense of community and a very real love for one another. 

What I see, as a somewhat outsider, from England, as well as being born in small town Ohio, is that I did have a lot of reasons to be proud of being American, even if they were based on naive understandings of our country and its history. I wasn’t the only one indoctrinated in our greatness, but I’m not the only one to still see goodness in how we have stood up to bullies and dealt with our past, occasionally. 

What I also see is that we are in a bad place right now, because instead of following through with our own much-needed Vergangenheitsbewältigung, we have a lot of Americans who want to cling to a myth of our past, instead of face up to the truth of who we are. We have a lack of integrity, and this is why we may yet fall. 

It isn’t so much that the Russians are trying to harm us through our stress lines, though they do like to poke us where it hurts, but it’s far more that we have a lot of Americans more devoted to the image they want of America, than the hard reality.

We have genocides in our history.

Not the Holocaust, over a short historical period of time, as Germany has had to come to terms with and must continue to do, but hundreds of years of hate and abuse we are not dealing with properly.

We have people who are genuinely ok with oppression, as long as it is not impacting them.

We have citizens who hate immigrants, whose ancestors came here as immigrants.

And we have Native American and African American heritage that needs to be at the forefront of our history, because the way we tell it right now is blatantly racist.

There’s nothing pro life about genocide, nor the suppression of the truth. And really, pro life has shown they only value babies, not women. It is a repulsive extremism, rooted in a history that would say a certain US state was “heaven for men and dogs, but it’s hell for women and horses.”

So where am I from?

I grew up in the UK, and my history teacher in high school taught us frankly, how the British Empire was responsible for atrocities. This was presented as a matter of fact, a shameful facet of British history, which was littered with insanely wicked acts by kings and queens, even the alleged good ones.

While the British could be proud of William Wilberforce’s efforts to abolish slavery, as well as other endeavors to make the world a better place, while they could be proud of the impact of Charles Dickens’ writings, while they could trace the beginning of freedoms in the United States to the Magna Carta, they could also be honest about massacres. 

These things happened, they were shameful, and they must be acknowledged. 

And I had wanted to talk about my past, growing up in the UK and also partially in the Christian (evangelical) world in America. I had wanted to explain that the question, “Where are you from” is fraught for many people, because we didn’t all get to grow up in one place. 

Instead, I find myself defending refugees and migrant workers, the poorest foreigners imaginable, because I was able to move freely and get the appropriate paperwork to be resident in more than the UK, because I had the means. And we weren’t rich. I can’t imagine what others have gone through; it is far worse than just “not knowing where you are from” in a concrete sense.

Asylum seekers or displaced people aren’t just dealing with existential identity crises, they are in survival mode, never knowing if they can go home, let alone wrestling with where home is. 

People are going through horrifying trauma, and American narcissists, who grew up in peace and security, yet threaten civil war at the drop of a hat: “they know not what they do,” and daily, I have to work to forgive them on that basis. 

I just wanted to raise awareness of a small struggle of my own, knowing that many people go through it, but in my lifetime, the level of trauma in the world has become a cry of desperation. Where you are from isn’t just fraught when it’s many places or cultures/subcultures, it is traumatizing for some of us. We can never go or be home with people, who do not want to understand people with experiences unlike theirs, as still equally as human as they. The rejection of neighbors is something akin to Nazism.

The question that is most compelling in our time is no longer, where are you from, so I can define you and stereotype you and put you into my worldview’s box. No, we need to come alongside people, because even people who grew up in a small town are facing some traumas with all these fast changes right now. The real question is now:

Where are you coming from?

I hope we can be humble enough to listen for the answer, and regarding entitled Americans, who do not wish to dig deep and look at their past, preferring to wallow in and pass on their shame with hatred and cruelty, I say walk away and move forward without them. 

The world has changed, and we cannot fit in their boxes anymore.

The only way forward is through. 

Where are you coming from, these days?