Location Taken: National Archives, Washington DC
Time Taken: November 2008
Today I was on the Minecraft multiplayer server I frequent, merrily building a giant tree and reading the chat to pass the time. One of them was joking around, pretending to be Australian, in full stereotypical way (I’m not sure he even knew anything about Australia other than “they have kangaroos” and “G’day Mate”.) And then, one of them, a young British teen I chat with a bunch, randomly asked me a question.
“Sharayah, is it fun being American?”
And I couldn’t give an answer.
Now, it was a half-joking question, and I wasn’t actively participating in the conversation, so I answered by not answering, if that makes sense. But it got me thinking. IS it fun being American?
Or more specifically, do I have fun being American?
I mean, sure, you’ll find plenty of people for whom the answer is an enthusiastic “Yes!”, and a large group with the equally enthusiastic “No!”. And plenty of people for whom the answer is “Yeah, I guess so, never really thought about it.” And of course, 6 billion people for whom the answer is “I’m not American”. Well, unless they’re one of the people who get irritated by the term American applying to just citizens of the United States of America and go “Yes, I’m American, I live in South America” or the like, but hey, there’s all sorts out there.
Me, I don’t have an answer.
Now, do I have fun? Well, yes. Am I American? Also yes. But to me, those things really aren’t connected in any way. There’s nothing about my “American-ness” that adds or subtracts noticeably from my enjoyment of life.
And really, when I list out the attributes of who I am, American doesn’t make the list. Mind you, neither does “brown-haired” or “Germanic ancestry”. They’re aspects of myself, but they’re by no means important ones to me.
I guess I’m not nationalistic enough or something. Not to mention that I’ve seen enough of this wide country to see just how diverse it all is, so there’s no one set of attributes I consider “being American”. And I don’t have anything in common with the national stereotype, so I can’t just fall back on that.
At a more fundamental level, I don’t strongly feel the tribalism streak most humans have strongly. I don’t root for a sports team just because they play nearby, I don’t support stopping immigration because the foreigners are taking all the jobs (to me, it’s humans on both sides), I don’t ascribe to any political party, and so on. The closest I come is that most basic of tribes, my family and friends, and even then…
I suppose even amongst the humans I feel closest to, I also feel like a bit of an outsider. Or rather, an observer. I’m just watching these odd humans do their odd human things. I don’t have a best friend, and all of my close friends have their own closer friends. I keep myself a bit apart from the crowd, just naturally. And I never feel like I fully join anything I do, always leaving a mental avenue of escape if I should choose to quit. I’m not sure why, it’s just one of my personality traits.
In some ways, you can say I’m in a tribe of one.
Which, really, may be why I’m not nationalistic or tribalistic. It’s Us vs. Them, but well, when “Us” is “Me”, it gets lonely. So I open up to all those “Thems”. But you’re all “Thems”. There’s no fundamental distinction between groups to me, just flavors of all the paths humans can take. I give everyone the same chance to prove themselves to me, whether they’re that nice person down the street who bakes cookies on Tuesdays or a Siberian Yak Herder or someone who’s homeless or what have you. Or at least I do when I emerge from my hermitage of a room.
So, is it fun to be American?
I don’t know. But it is fun to be me.
