"Living Abroad Taught Me to Love America," Janine di Giovanni, Feb 10, 2018, New York Times
Image from article, with caption: President Trump's Motorcade proceeds along
Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington inauguration day, Jan 20, 2017
I ran away from America. In my late teens, I decided I didn’t want to be hemmed in
by the place where I grew up. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision; through
education, work, marriage, a child and a collection of foreign passports, I more or
less made myself European, and for the next three decades I lived the expat life. But
I was always, at heart, American — as a reporter working in war zones, when I spoke
to refugees, when I traveled through broken post-conflict countries.
And so last year I returned home — just in time to see people here and abroad
running away from America.
When I arrived in London on a crowded Air India flight nearly 30 years ago,
Britain was in tumult. There were strikes and anti-American protests; Margaret
Thatcher was unpopular, and Ronald Reagan was in power.
For the first time, I saw what America represented to the world: greed. My
English cousins batted me down at dinner parties about America’s global bullying
and mocked its “have a nice day” optimism. When I went to an interview for my first
job — as a junior editor on a daily newspaper — the recruiter told me I did not have
the proper skills.
“But I’m sure I can do it,” I protested.
“Of course you think you can,” she jeered. “You’re an American!”
I finally found work at a feminist newspaper in East London, where the editor in
chief had grown up in awe of Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
and Angela Davis. “Only America could produce women like that,” she told me.
After 17 years in England, I moved to France, where I spent 13 more years
raising my French son. France, too, was going through changes — economic malaise
and a brain drain that sent talented young people fleeing abroad. Eventually, I left
there as well, not because of France but because of the pull of America. I had
achieved my youthful goal, only to find that, in the end, I wanted to be back home.
The United States I have returned to is vastly different from the one I left during
the Reagan years. Then, the news came slowly, in small doses, and reading
“Doonesbury” was a form of resistance. Today, the news comes too fast; my friends
are thrust into a state of gloom with each new turn of the Trump administration.
And yet, despite the election cycle, despite the opioid crisis, despite the tax bill,
despite yawning inequality, I still see good in this country.
For one thing, I’ve heard it all before; when it comes to confronting anti-Americanism,
I’m a veteran. Anytime I work in Gaza or the West Bank, and must
explain why the Trump administration is cutting funding to refugees. Every time I
work with a Syrian refugee and must explain why we have a travel ban against
Muslims. Over a decade ago, I climbed the stairs to my Baghdad hotel room
thinking, how can I ever go home and live in a country that is so dedicated to
occupation and regime change?
But there were other moments. I was walking down Rue de Rivoli in Paris on
Sept. 11, 2001, when my phone rang. “Someone just flew a plane through the twin
towers,” a friend told me. The pain and despair I felt in the following days was
matched by the private and public sympathy I felt from thousands of Parisians.
When I served as the jury president for the prize for war reporting given in
Bayeux, the first city to be liberated during the Battle of Normandy, the mayor
showed me the expanse of American graves at the nearby military cemetery as a way
of demonstrating what America meant to him, his family and his people.
As a liberal and human rights activist, I am cognizant of the dark times we live
in. But I try to remember that generally, and where it counts, we usually do it right.
The First Amendment. The New Deal. The Four Freedoms. The Marshall Plan. The
opportunity and social mobility that is more possible than in any other country
where I have lived.
Without getting into Norman Rockwell platitudes, I see a determined
pragmatism, a freshness that comes from growing up in America that only someone
who spent years away from it can notice. As the mother of a child in the French
educational system, I was aware of how positive reinforcement and encouragement
is frowned on in Europe. “Oh you Americans, always saying, ‘Good boy!’” one of my
son’s teachers once told me. “We don’t believe in doing that.”
In France, only the very bright can enter programs to prepare them for the
graduate schools that act as iron gateways to the elite. In America, we draw our
political and economic leadership from everywhere. Yes, there are loans. But there
are also chances.
I am deeply aware of our health care problems. I am aware of continued
segregation, the racism, the efforts to restrict voting rights. But I still believe that at
its core America both recognizes its flaws and struggles to overcome them. “America
is great because she is good,” Alexis de Tocqueville is often quoted as saying. “If
America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”
My friends don’t see it that way. They’re losing hope with each week. But I tell
them it’s the best possible time to be in the resistance. Only during times of darkness
can you see the stars, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said. The #MeToo
movement came out of this darkness. Black Lives Matter came out of this darkness.
The press is stronger and better than it has been in decades. There is a real focus on
the most marginalized in society, more so than when I left in the 1980s.
I also think about my time working in places like Moscow, Turkey, Syria and
Iran. I think about fellow journalists working in Saudi Arabia — our great ally — who
are imprisoned and even threatened with execution simply for blogging. I’ve been
followed, hacked and barred (from two of those places), but I am still able to write
this and travel freely in the United States. So are the people whose views I find
repellent.
We have a long way to go. We’ve been badly wounded by the 2017 inauguration,
and we are still limping. But I know we can do it, because, having lived outside
America for more than half my life, I still see the kind of stuff we Americans are
made of [JB emphasis]
Janine di Giovanni is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, an adjunct professor
of human rights at Columbia’s School of International and Public Administration and
the author, most recently, of “The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria.”
No comments:
Post a Comment