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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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This seems like a pretty nebulous concept with a lot of wiggle room for interpretation.
Like, am I proud of having been born in the specific place I was and having the parents that I do? I ain't had shit to do with that. I'm American by accident. I'm no more proud of being American than I am of being 5'10": it's just a box I fit into, honestly somewhat uncomfortably. I'm proud of the work I do and the achievements I've... achieved, but nothing I've done would be impossible anywhere else. If anything, there are parts of the world where what I've achieved would have been easier to do and where my preferred lifestyle is more widely accepted (for context, this refers to that I don't like cars, don't own or want to own one, and choose to get around by bike and transit instead) (a friend of my dad's recently told him that I "need a European girlfriend" because "American women don't understand guys like him:" for the record, I've never met this woman).
Anyway, pointless rambling aside, America is just one country out of hundreds in the world, and I don't see why I should feel all nationalistic about having been born in it.
For a lot of folks, I think this is accurate, but the problem is that the US has totally and absolutely exhausted all of its WWI/WWII "good guy" image on the global scene.. As a base line, I feel generally neutral about where I was born, because I had no control over it. It's when I show empathy and factor in the opinion of others that things sour. The US military spent 2/3 of my life bombing Afghan villagers, and they mortgaged my future to do it. I can't be proud of that. We allowed unfettered greed to run rampant with no supervision and crashed the world economy multiple times. I'm not proud of that either.
I have this conversation with some of my older relatives occasionally, and I always tell them that in order for me to be proud, the US needs to do something that's worth being proud of. And while there are some small things, there's nothing that outweighs the immense damage the US has done to the world as a whole in my lifetime.
Very true. I was keeping my scope to just my personal experience, but if you expand how you look at the country to include things that have been done in its name, then we live in a country whose government has systematically oppressed people and aided in genocides, fascist coups, and so many other terrible things throughout the world, and all of that pushes me to be actively the opposite of proud of it. But that also raises the question of to what extent does being proud of your country entail being proud of its government, and that's some political theory shit I don't have the straws for right now.