To celebrate the fourth of July, I thought I would list the reasons that I love the good old USA:
1. Americans! In general they are friendly, outgoing and will tell you their life story at the drop of a hat. I love that! When you buy your groceries, the people in line talk to each other, the cashier talks to you, the bagger talks to you. You can strike up a conversation with almost anyone. Meet them on the street and they will have you sitting in their house for a visit within 10 minutes (this happens to us all the time).
2. Ethnic diversity! European, Hispanic, African American, Native American - and lots of other strong immigrant cultures. And all the types of restaurants and lifestyles that we get because of that.
3. Geographic diversity! Rain forests, deserts, mountains, wide open badlands areas, rolling hills. Big cities, medium cities, small towns. For someone who likes to live in different places, there are endless places to choose from and to travel to.
4. It is more like 50 little countries than one big country. Really. For example, New Mexico is very different than Washington state - in the food we eat, the way we live, the geography, the way our houses are built.
5. New York City - and Los Angeles. Fabulous huge cities.
6. Bruce Springsteen. And all the great American songwriters and musicians.
7. Phillip Roth. And all the great American writers.
8. NPR (National Public Radio). Talk of the Nation, All Things Considered, What do you Know?, Car Talk. Streaming audio on npr.com.
9. The food. The availablity of natural and organic foods. The abundance of vegetarian selections in many places. The American breakfast. Refillable cups of coffee. Ice tea!!
10. Overnight delivery to every address.
11. The old hippie communities that you can still find all around the US.
12. The variety of lifestyles that you can choose from - the many ways you can live your life here.
That is my list. Anyone have anything to add?
Note: This is not to say that I don't love Canada or all the European countries. Or that I think the American way is the only way. Or that I don't love Australia and New Zealand (except I have never been there - but am pretty positive I would love them.) I just thought I would list what I like about the US.
Great list, Pauline. I would only add, willingness to help. I was a child in the 50s, and I remember making packages to send to kids in Europe and elsewhere who needed basics for school, personal care, etc. The Marshall Plan... We could be doing better for the world (a tiny percentage of our national budget is for foreign aid- less than 2%, I think), but when disasters strike, both manmade and natural, we dig deep for others.
Posts: 403 | Location: Wisconsin | Registered: 26 April 2002
I am going to make a heartfelt effort not to let this posted reply bleed over into partisanship. I love my country- this country, the one Pauline describes. If you see me walking around with a T-shirt that proclaims
quote:I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK!
, that's the country I'm talking about. Like a good parent, I'm not indifferent to destructive behavior (criticism is a loving and patriotic endeavor) and I believe in positive reinforcement of virtues.
1. Americans! In general we are a people in search of community in whatever farflung parts of the country our work or dreams take us. We've been scattered across a vast land,often parted from hometowns and the preceding generations of our own families, so we'll talk to you as if you were family!
2. My apartment building isn't very big, but there are whites and blacks, Christians, Jews and aethists in it. There are old people, young people, married, single, living together, straight and gay people, not to mention children and pets. There's a man from Germany and a girl from Nigeria and a couple from China. And that's just the building! Very WASP, Arabic and Hispanic communities comprise the neighborhood around it. (You think you got restaurants?We got restaurants!) And the struggle to maintain legal aid services, day care, health care, affordable housing, etc. for any of us who may happen to need it.
3.The natural wonders within the borders of the United States are the patrimony of all its peoples in the way that the glorious architectural and artistic treasures of older cultures are the patrimony of theirs. Stewardship, not neglect or avarice, is the appropriate stance toward our riches. Preserving them is our gift to the world.
4. A Lega Nord guy in Italy once asked me what I thought of the idea of splitting the north off from the center and south of Italy. I told him that my country would be immeasurably poorer if it had split in two during the preceding century, especially culturally, and that maybe he'd want to consider that.
5. And Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, Boston, etc.
6. And B.B.King and Billie Holliday and Janis Joplin, and Eddie Pacheco, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Parliment Funkadelic,.............
7. Eudora Welty, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston.....
8. National Public Radio
9. The renaissance of small quality food shops and the shops that carry imported food from all over the world.
10. Almost everyone having e-mail.
11. The Sierra Club, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ACLU and NAACP, Emily's List....
12. The growing awareness we share with other countries that our daughter, sisters and selves are among the minority of truly free women in the world and need to work at protecting those freedoms and making them universal.
Shannon, Neil Young, like me, is originally Canadian!! Let's hear it for the Canadian expats - me, Steve, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, the South Park guys, Leonard Cohen (but he still part time lives in Montreal I think).
And the American expats living in Canada!! William Gibson and most of my friends in Vancouver.
14. Newspaper comics. I have never seen any country, other than the US and Canada, have such great daily comics in the paper. (But then, I haven't been everywhere.)
My sister, Suzanne, lived up on King's Mt. for several years and was friends with Neil and his family. She used to go over to Bear Gulch Road to work with his son, doing patterning for the CP. I met him briefly one New Year's Eve at the now defunk Alex's Mountain House. Shannon be a home girl!
11. American indie bands Wilco, Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips, and Sparklehorse.
12. Beck.
Joanna, I grew up in Half Moon Bay, when it was still basically a hippie town. Whole families would go the Miramar Inn for music and chowder, and Neil Young and Joan Baez would sometimes come down and play. Us kids didn't really care about that... we cared about catching snakes and eating licorice sticks when our parents weren't looking.
Tracy Chapman lives up there now.. it has changed alot from when I grew up. It really was a paradise. Now it is all built up, makes me sad to go there.
On music, I grew up in Texas and while country is not my favorite style of music, I would like to add Patsy Cline to the list.
Several years ago I was working for an Italian company here. All the computer geeks were put in one room. There was an Argentinean, a German, an Italian and myself. My computer was used to play music. So I brought in my Patsy Cline cds and introduced her as the "Queen of Country Music". After a while my colleagues started asking, metti la regina (put the queen on)
I also second Shannon’s #7 and #8. I read some interesting articles some time ago on Granta magazine. It was not long after Sept 11th. The issue contained articles written by 24 authors from all over the world about what they thought of America. Not all are positive, and rightly so. Some are quite interesting and are still online.
There was one by an Indian author in which he talked about being fairly anti-American all his adult life until he went to the states with his wife who got a scholarship to Yale. He was surprised to see a university dean drive himself to his office, get out of his car, get a box out of the trunk and carry it himself up to his office. You can read the article here.
I thought he was a Brit? He does sing about Houston on an album I have.
I would LOVE to meet Neil Young - you guys are lucky!! I am part way thru his biography, but still in the Northern Ontario years - you have inspired me to pick the book up again.
A friend of mine wrote a novel (Wholeness of a Broken Heart - Riverhead Books) with a quote from Neil Young. He requested a signed copy of the book. The best I could do was touch the book before she sent it to him - so that he and I have touched the same thing. (And she is not even a Neil Young fan.)
When we emmigrated to the US, our Canadian friends asked us how we could ever consider moving to such a country. We would answer "Any country that produced Bruce Springsteen and Roy Orbison can't be all bad."
Beck is from L.A. His dad was an artist and his mom was in one of Andy Warhol's movies. He is all of comtemporary American pop wrapped into one skinny blond package.
I think what I like about America and Americans the most is our cockeyed optimism. Even 911, Iraq, Enron, and the economy can't keep the average American from being optimistic about his future and the future of his children. American's, for the most part, are much better at looking ahead than backward. Maybe it is because our history is a short story instead of an epic. But that forward looking nature is what makes America the land of opportunity. Scarlet O'Hara, with her famous final line... was simply being an American. PS Since we are also expressing our appreciation for some of American's favorite sons, I'd like to mention Ken Burns -- who has made it his life work to show us ourselves.
Deborah Horn
In a previous life I was an Umbrian sunflower farmer. I'd like to do a past life regression and stay there. ----------------------------------- www.petsburg.com
Posts: 5033 | Location: St. Louis, MO | Registered: 04 September 2001
I love the (perhaps naive) belief in meritocracy (a combination of Shannon's #7, #8 and Livinwell's optimism, I guess). I know that there are still lots of back room deals that go on, and lots of people hired because their dad golfs with so-and-so, but the fact remains that I went to an excellent university for four years and hardly paid a dime because I worked my butt off and got scholarships. I love the overwhelming sense that anything is possible for anyone who really works at it.
Just went out and watched the fireworks over the East River here in NYC, talked to my sister in Australia, and am watching Dolly Parton on the Capitol lawn in D.C. singing 'When Johnny Comes Marching Home.' Dolly's da bomb! Ya gotta love it, this country.
On the news we just saw a fire burning in the wilderness near Taos - you could see the flames from town - but they say there is no danger to Taos or Taos Pueblo. We live an hour south of Taos and I can hear the fireworks my neighbors are setting off - and I am pretty sure fireworks are illegal right now!!
quote: South Park. My favorite thing on TV. It was written by two Canadian guys, but they live in the US.
Trey Parker & Matt Stone? Both born in the US, I think. I know Trey was born in Colorado. Love South Park. Husband got me the first season on DVD for Christmas and we just ordered the second season.
Chris
Posts: 780 | Location: Birch Bay, WA | Registered: 02 December 2002
Great photo, Carol! (You can post it again in four days on your 1-year SlowTalk Anniversary! )
Many who preceded me posted eloquently about some of my feelings for the good old USA. I'll just add: 4th of July Parades! I spent the morning at the Redwood City Independence Day parade - one of the largest here in the West. I strolled along the perimeter of the crowds to look for my friends, and stopped on a random corner to watch the parade for awhile.
I saw: multi-generational Chinese dancers in costume, bodies swaying to no particular music, carrying beautiful fabric lotus blossoms; followed by a boisterous reggae band jamming in the back of a truck; followed by a jeep full of seniors from the local Eagles Lodge (service organization); followed by antique fire trucks rattling along belching exhaust (one had a small sign painted on it saying, "Haven't lost a foundation yet"); followed by about 60 young people in Sea Rescue Cadets white uniforms marching very crisply; followed by a casual Unitarian Universalist group, each holding the end of a long strand made up of colorful paper cranes attached to a center canopy (it looked like a peace-ful Maypole). Earlier I saw a group of "Veterans for Peace" marching and waving an American flag, followed by Country Joe McDonald on a float playing guitar and singing, "This Land is Your Land."
When I'm part of a day like today, it makes me feel good to be an American.
Posts: 14303 | Location: The Beautiful San Francisco Bay Area | Registered: 06 August 2001
Thanks, Slow Travellers, for your expressions of appreciation for the USofA. It is a great place, with great potential.
We're still a very young country--adolescents, you might say. We're very cocky and immature, as a country. Our behavior is not always praise-worthy. As an American soldier in Afghanistan was quoted as saying, "I love my country; I don't always love my government." That's how I feel right now.
Our constitution and Bill of Rights are brilliantly conceived documents. I hope we will treat them with the respect they deserve, and try to live up to the ideals they represent.
Charity
Posts: 1486 | Location: Santa Barbara, CA, USA | Registered: 11 May 2003
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