chat

To be clear, the reason why I wanted to point out that "being American" is a different thing from "living in the USA" was really just to poke at how people in the USA think of national identity vis-a-vis land/birthplace/residency.

Which is to say, I feel like many people in the USA have practically umbilically tied their sense of national identity to the land: they consider themselves Americans because they live in or were born in the USA, right? And I feel like this conception makes the continued rule of the land by the USA both completely natural and absolutely necessary in their eyes: any threat to the USA's rule is also on some level a threat to their own personal identities.

Likewise those like me, who manage to be American without this umbilical cord plugged into the land, end up triggering cognitive dissonance among the USA's patriots. Patriots loathe the idea that you can be American without having been born in nor ever having lived in nor even desiring to live in the USA, because if you can just do that — i.e. if Americans can basically just become a diaspora minority group laying claim to not even a single square inch of land — then what the Hell's even the point of the USA continuing to exist? There is no answer to this question other than that the USA has no reason to exist, and in fact should not continue to exist. But if this is a conclusion that you cannot accept, then, well...

In any case, use of the terms America or American to refer to the whole continent from Tierra del Fuego to Greenland is a different matter.