It’s A Dark Day to Be An American

Welcome to another four years of being ashamed of this country.

Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash

I wake at 5:32am and scroll to see the election results — Trump wins the U.S. presidency — and I’m sick, but not surprised. Because it’s a familiar sickness. We’ve been here before. We wake to realize our country is filled with so much rage and a desire for a time when hate was common but whitewashed. When America was allegedly great because white Christian men held dominion and it’s those men, and those who want to perpetuate this fiction, who enrage me.

I’m admittedly part of this hate. And this rage. And this shame.

I watch a documentary about a family of six living in a motel in Florida. The strip is rife with fast food restaurants and five-star family fun. This is the home of Disney, after all, and while a single mother works two jobs another family tries to feign normalcy in conditions that are anything but.

The children ask questions. Why are we living in a motel? What happened to our house? Will I ever have my own room? Why can’t we go back home without realizing the horrific reality that this is home.

I could quote you statistics, but this story isn’t about plotting a through-line from the rugged individualism in the 1920s and 30s to the 2008 recession and the havoc it wrought. How we no longer have a middle class, but only the filthy rich and the working poor, with a sliver of people struggling in between. Many of whom fear anything that might jeopardize their precarious balance — wading through deep waters versus being pulled under. One hospital stay could bankrupt you. Being made “redundant” after 15 years of service could rob you of your home and livelihood.

I could show you charts comparing the tally of school shootings in the United States to other developed nations and it would be stark and chilling. I could prattle on about the politicians on both sides of the aisle who are not for the people, but rather whores for the NRA or big corporations and other lobbyists that keep them in power while all of them try to wash the blood off their hands. But I’m not here to do that.

I’ve been thinking about being an American, a country so steeped in greed, exceptionalism, and individualism, we still can’t get a virus under control or prevent people with machine guns to murder children. In the richest country in the world, millions of people live below the poverty line or live in motels, on couches, in their cars, or in tents on the street. People like you and me. You can be educated, have a house, car, and a job and still find yourself destitute.

A few weeks ago, Hurricane Milton in Florida makes landfall as a Category 3 storm (translation: not good) and there are scores of people who want to evacuate (and are immediately and viciously attacked for not doing so), but can’t because they literally do not have money to leave. They can’t afford gas. They can’t afford a hotel room for weeks at a time. They don’t have credit cards and weren’t thrust out of the womb with a 730 credit rating. They are living paycheck to paycheck and for them, escape is a luxury. Imagine having to risk your life because you can’t afford otherwise. In America. Supposedly the richest country on earth.

I hold degrees from top universities in the country (Fordham, Columbia) I’m well-educated, privileged, and have decades of work experience at a senior executive level. Yet, right now, I haven’t filed my taxes this year because I can’t afford my accountant’s fees, and I routinely have to choose between my cat’s escalating vet bills and my dental bills. And yes, I work hard. I budget. But still. I have panic attacks when I have to deal with the IRS.

So, I can’t imagine those who are not as educated or privileged. And I can’t fathom I live in a country that has no empathy or compassion for them.

I believed the fantastic fiction sold to my generation (X) growing up. If you work hard, keep your head down, go with the plan, society will reward you. You’ll have the job, the mortgage, the 2.2 kids, and you can travel to the afterlife knowing you lived the best you could. I no longer believe these lies. I don’t trust corporations and big businesses, the majority of which treat human beings like commodities. They’re traded for cheaper goods. People who take what they can get. People who don’t form unions. People who keep quiet and are grateful for the paltry paychecks while executives fly private and send their children to private school.

Because the American Dream, it seems, only works if so many people suffer.

Like most Americans, I’m subsumed by student loan debt and a culture that propagated consumerism. I’m overwhelmed by the choices I made as a result of the two. I’m nervous because I don’t have a retirement, a safety net, a mommy and daddy to run home to. I’m scared because one long stretch without client work or a few months of clothes not getting sold could make me a statistic. I’ve seen former executives and ivy league graduates living in cars. I know peers who’ve become homeless. It’s real even if we don’t want to believe it.

Who’s to say it’ll never be us when you see countless people who never thought it could be us become them.

They believed COVID couldn’t touch them. They shimmied into the pool with their swimsuits, goggles, and inflatable donuts and made a mess of it. Sporting visors and sunglasses, they slathered on sunscreen fragrant with coconut and passion fruit. Mask-less, juice boxes in tow, they pretended to be on a resort holiday in Fiji or Maldives where the water is an impossible blue and the sand is hot, clean, and bone-white. But the reality was we were in the middle of the desert and our ocean was a tiny, chlorinated pool surrounded by manufactured greenery.

A few months after the pandemic was the earthquake we expected but never say coming, I marveled at the family of ducks making a home in the water. How they squawked and clacked and splashed, and now it feels wrong to violate their reverie. Ours is an intrusive race. Given time, there are no spaces humans won’t colonize and occupy.

I used to live in a closed community that was host to a monied lot who believed the pandemic didn’t exist for them. Masks were an inconvenience. Social distancing was a cute trend of which they grew weary. With ball fists, they stomped their little feet. Their tones were emphatic. We’re Americans! We have the right to spread sickness if we want to! We have the right to our Targets, Walmarts, and Tiffany charm bracelets! Failing to realize the distinction between a right and a privilege.

Funny when it’s the ducks that broke you.

One day, after a morning of silence and work, I log into the internet to witness the unimaginable. White terrorists storming the Capitol. I watch officers take selfies with them, let them in, and gently escort them out. I don’t have Twitter, but I make the mistake of searching hashtags and I go numb. I am horrified and humiliated because I live in a deeply sick country. And I don’t think the vaccine will be our cure.

I don’t love the country I live in — I haven’t for a long time. In my twenties, the internet was a shiny, curious object and I still believed the news reports on nighttime TV. We didn’t have the instantaneous and democratized news cycle we now take for granted. No one was publishing cell phone videos to Twitter because in the late 90s and early ’00s there was no Twitter. Outside major metropolitan cities, most people cleaved to what they saw on TV, heard on the radio, or read in their local newspaper.

Politics eluded me; I had the privilege of not paying attention to the world because it felt untenable and so much larger than me. I worshipped at the great altar that was the American fiction — we were the righteous and good combatting some distant, nefarious evil. Although I was never quite sure where that evil was because once I thought I knew it, understood it, it seemed to change form.

Never did I consider that the call would be coming from inside the house. That we were often no better than the enemy we rallied against.

Everything changed once the Towers fell. When one unseasonably warm day in September, a day when I got into work earlier than usual, a day when I turned on the television in my boss’s office and couldn’t believe what I saw. A day when my boss called me from the Lincoln Tunnel and asked me what was going on. And I remember riding down the elevator and walking out onto 23rd Street and seeing the plume of smoke in the sky.

I remember the walk to my home downtown and ashes raining down. How a police officer stopped me on Houston Street and asked if I had a passport — who brings their passport to work? Who could have foreseen this unfathomable terror? And the sky grew dark and grey in the late morning as I gathered my things and made the trek to Spanish Harlem because the subways were out of service. And I remember everyone wandering aimlessly, dazed and confused. Did what happen really happen? Our distraught was collective.

But what I remember most was a trip overseas months later. The anti-American protests in Paris. Men in bars in St. Petersburg telling me, in broken English, how much their country hates George Bush, and by extension, all Americans. Do you know George Bush? No. I don’t know him. You Americans. You think you’re so much better than everyone else.

It was the first time I paid attention to the news and yes, I was naive, but I sat in hotel rooms in Paris and Madrid, in dorm rooms for the near month I spent in Russia, watching the narrative that wasn’t constructed by Americans. We weren’t the heroes of every story because the world in which we lived was more complex and filled with compromise and deal-making. Politicking and placating. And sometimes lies. And this knowledge would continue for the next two decades where I’d have to rely on dozens of sources to piece together some semblance of truth.

I can’t explain the chasm I feel widening between who I am and the language I speak in the country I was raised in — I can only suggest a kind of absence, a gaping hole where love and pride once resided. I’m willing to discard the language I know to fumble in the dark to another. It started many years ago when I’d travel and people asked where I was from and I’d say, New York, and they’d say, America, and I’d correct them, repeating, New York, New York. How do I reconcile the home I knew for forty years is now a stranger? How I move from place to place, but can’t find where I fit?

I couldn’t articulate the shame I felt when I heard the word American, but I could discern its form and shape.

This is larger than two parties constantly at war and choosing the lesser of two evils, which feels like a constant every election year — it’s about the truth. Who owns it, who tells it, and how we come to know or not know it. This is not a political story and I’m deliberately not bringing specifics into the picture because politics has a way of building walls between decent people. And as the days pass and the chasm grows wider between “us” and “them,” it occurs to me our country may never be made whole in my lifetime. Living with people on the same street starts to feel as if we’re continents apart.

I have lost life-long friends because of our politics and I’m not sure we’ll ever find our way back. Because we’re stubborn. Because we think we’re right. Sometimes, we are. It’s easy to make the other person a villain in a story that’s probably too complicated for any one person to grasp. So, maybe it started then, back in 2016, and all the days after as the cracks in the fault became a 7.2 on the human Richter.

I remember the first earthquake I experienced in California and the feeling of unheimlich. How you have no control of the earth, which always felt solid and still, shifting and moving beneath your feet. It’s a terrifying thing to know that which you’ve taken for granted is never truly stable.

This is how I feel living in this country right now.

Who could’ve ever anticipated a global pandemic and all the havoc it wrought? How it exasperated our gross consumption culture and hyper-individualism. How people in one of the richest countries on earth can’t stomach two months of inconvenience for the greater good. How it’s easier to say that this sickness is a hoax than to consider the larger affected community. How they’ll picket in close-knit groups in the street not for the plentiful rights they already have, but for the privileges they’re desperate not to lose.

We’ll look out for our own. We’ll frolic on the beaches and sun on the shores for no other reason than we want to. We’ve become a country of wants and demands. Petulant children stomping their feet while the world watches, mouth agape. We wear our masks and practice social distancing as a capitulation. Our problem is larger than politics, it’s about societal values, norms, and basic human decency. How we value our relationships in relation to the whole. How we care about the people in a two-foot radius and everyone else is disposable.

No, no, we’ll never say these horrible, selfish things out loud. We’ll smother this narrative by punctuating stories of people acting out of empathy and compassion. We’ll celebrate our minor victories. But make no mistake, it’s there. Simmering beneath the surface. We become more cruel and Darwinian than most and we’re not even in a pressure cooker. The water has only just come to a boil.

The truth is I live in a country fixated on individual wants, where the individual has no problem sacrificing the whole if it means their survival. A country where you can make $100,000 a year and still not afford healthcare.

But we do love our status, our finery, our collection of expensive things. Our freedom to stomp our little feet like children if we want to.

I live in a country where every problem can be solved by a little gumption and a lot of hard work, while conveniently ignoring the systems and structures in place that make it impossible to level the playing field. A country we pillaged and robbed to get, built on the blood and backs of others, and we still won’t admit we haven’t changed much in the centuries since. A country where women have hard-earned rights but we are reminded how fast we can be raped and murdered in the comments. A country where I can never talk about how I was violently raped in my home because some asshole on the internet will find a way to tell me it was my fault. I’m a victim playing the victim card — how meta.

A country that purports to have come a long way baby when it comes to mental health but will shun those suffering behind the tweets, exhaling that Virginia Slim. A country where making more money is never enough. We are drowning and credit bureaus are deflating the life jackets. It’s your fault, people love to say. Student loans are your fault when hiring managers demand a college degree for a job that pays $15/hour. We love talking about “personal responsibility” when the collective makes it impossible to breathe. I live in a country where people will collapse under a $400 emergency expense and, of course, that’s your fault. It’s always your fault.

Lies are lovely when it suits a narrative.

So, leave! The collective bark affixing their American flag stickers on their bumpers and balling their fists. We do live in a country of fist-ballers — this much is true.

Yes, I would very much like to leave. But my passport is a paper weight. Few countries will have me, and I don’t blame them.

I don’t know where to put myself — where I fit. At the end of last year, I decided to embark on a yearlong journey of traipsing around California, trying to fall deeper in love, in want, of the adopted home in which I live. New York has too much dark history. From a mountain town of 161 people to a home in the high desert where my clothes stained terracotta and gold — all it did was make me yearn for a place to call home.

But what do you do when the only place, country, and continent you’ve known doesn’t feel like home? Where do you go? Where do you live?

Maybe the question isn’t when, it’s how.

There is no shortage of strangers who believe they can repair and fix. My problems are so easy to solve if only they had the opportunity to solve them. They issue their armchair pop psychology and sympathy missives when I never once asked for their advice. As if me documenting this journey to and through myself deserves a neat and tidy resolution after eight minutes of reading. As if I’m not a person in progress trying to find her way home.

Where do you go when you don’t know where to go, but you know it has to be somewhere other than here? This is me, on my knees, tearing through clothes, breaking through my skin, to wrench out my still-beating heart. Blood-soaked hands. A body is a crime scene. All just to know you’re alive. To hear your heart beat.

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If you are a Trump supporter, unfollow me. I do not want you to support my work. Ever.