What to do with a Problem Like America?
Between the America that was and the America that is, there is the Song of America.
While American history has its challenges, America is not the collection of its wounds. I’m inclined to say that possibly no one person or idea is. Life is more complex than that, but that complexity tends to get shaved down to one monolithic vision or another. Our history, beliefs, challenges, ideas, and desires are more closely resemble the flow and complexity of song than they do pillars of beliefs.
In the 1996 film Independence Day, the U.S. president played by actor Bill Pullman delivers a hallmark call to union as humanity faces obsoletion at the hands of an alien race: “We will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive!”
Twenty-seven years later, the United States faces not too different a future — except now the alien threat it faces is a series of ideas that the hosts of those ideas believe can only thrive if the idea of America dies.
In recent years, as patriotism was confused with the nationalism of the far right, it became less and less popular to celebrate the birth of our nation. Americans celebrating freedom are at greater risk of being accused of white supremacy as the ball and chain of the past is dragged into the present as an eternal haunting reminder of America’s conflicted origin story.
No one will contest that America — like any other nation — has a complex history. Yes, the founding fathers owned slaves and believed that the worth of a black person, an indigenous person or even a woman was worth less than the full weight of a white man’s opinion. This difficult history doesn’t break the idea of America nor diminish the raw courage it took for the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, many of whom went on to lose life, loved ones, and belonging in the fight for freedom.
As an Afghan-South Asian immigrant coming to the United States as a child, the stories of the American Revolution and the promise that is America stoked a profound respect for freedom. I was born in a culture that struggled to see the individual, while here Americans had individuality fought for two centuries ago — something many of them now yawn at. Freedom was a completely novel idea and it has shaped the work I’ve done in my adult life, offering that same breath of revolutionary spirit as a battle cry against destructive religious ideologies like Islamic extremism.
Just like Islam, in which a theology is dealing with an invasive alien idea like extremism, the idea of American freedom is at the risk of being annihilated by a foreign idea that is antithetical to every principle our nation was founded upon.
While American history has its challenges, America is not the collection of its wounds. I’m inclined to say that possibly no one person or idea is. Life is more complex than that, but that complexity tends to get shaved down to one monolith vision or another. Our history, our beliefs, our challenges, our ideas, and our desires are more closely resemble the flow and complexity of song than they do pillars of beliefs.
As an immigrant who through a series of life experiences has always been wedged between the polarities of one mainstream or another, America has always been richer than the dumbed down nationalism or vitriolic anti-American hate.
America is a song of hope and the promise of excellence. America is a landscape of the heart, a foraging frontier through which we search for the wilderness of our heart. Despite the heartbreaking conflicts and genocides, beyond slavery and its systemic heirs, there is a song that beats wildly — one that people around the world still hear and still remember as a calling. Whether or not they’re American or ever life in this land called America, there is a shared vision for a freedom that like the eye of an artist is always working toward greater expression and refinement.
The challenge we have isn’t America the idea; the challenge we have is how to embody that freedom, how to understand what that could mean still.
These are fine questions to have. The problem is the search for questions and answers form into ideologies at faster and faster speeds, fueling the radicalization rift.
Newer ideologies that center around the narrative of homogenous inclusion without discernment would like us to amplify the presence of psychological wounds. The perpetual narrative of trauma and its hyper focus on lack — in order to survive — needs to destabilize the central idea of American excellence that invites all people to push forward toward new frontiers.
Yet, the alien idea of obsessive trauma fixations rooted in identity obsessions can only thrive on regression, including holding onto puritanical standards that were out of place in earlier times. That obsession produces virtue extremists. Virtue extremists are not just satisfied with modifying the behavior of the living; they’ll punish the dead for living in the past. Nothing ever becomes good enough once a victim narrative sets in that’s constantly looking in the rear-view mirror.
Virtue extremists put the vehicle of human potential in reverse, retroactively running over anything and anyone of value in the past if it doesn’t align with the values of the hour.
America is an idea, embodied by its people who mark the birth of a nation that has since been striving for excellence, a beacon for millions of people the world over. American patriotism is the devotion to that belief, that we can be anything, do anything, and break the binds of identities that tether us. We can build a new home in the landscape of possibility. For that, America will always be an idea worth celebrating — and protecting.
Shireen Qudosi is the author of The Song of the Human Heart: Dawn of the Dark Feminine in Islam, which speaks to the theologically-sound parallel reality of the world’s second-largest religion.