By Nicole D’entremont
This past February, I received my Canadian citizenship certificate. It took months to process but is now official proof of Canadian citizenship due to my first-generation birthright descent. I am grateful for a document that underscores my love and allegiance for my Nova Scotia French Acadian ancestry. But, I also love the United States of America, the United States where for 82 years I have lived in and tried to live up to its promise of freedom and equality for all. However, as we know, this is a promise that is being sorely tested today — regardless of our individual political persuasions.
I came of age in the era when a young, Catholic president stood hatless on a cold, blustery, wintery day calling out to my generation to ask not what your country could do for you but rather what you could do for your country. And we believed him. We tried to do that through the Peace Corps and the civil rights movement and sadly, yet concurrently, through both the peace movement and the young soldiers fighting in the war in Vietnam.
I love the United States of America. It’s a United States of America that does not deny its flaws. It’s the United States of America that Woody Guthrie wrote about: “This is our country here.” Guthrie sang of a country he saw made up of all its pretty parts and all its ugly parts and, then, because he saw both sides, he sang of wanting to change the ugly parts because … this is our country here.
The reason I cannot leave the United States is because I see the above mash-up today, too, and when you see those discrete differences, you want to do something about it. In my own life, that meant moving while in my 20s in the 1960s from a Pennsylvania rural area that had became a suburb to New York City’s skid row, then called the Bowery. All those early impressions that shaped my consciousness became a template for all the pretty and all the ugly and how people of various races and economic classes coped with their situations either by running away from or learning from all that dissonance. It was the best education I ever received. And, it also gave me a context for everything that followed historically up to and including today.
All the foreign wars since then, all the race, class, gender, you-name-it ideological disputes we had then and now seem to unspool from a basic disagreement about how to cope, educate ourselves, talk through and work together effectively as a society to solve a problem. We don’t want to see how the pretty parts and the ugly parts are maybe always going to be there for us to figure out. And now, we have the undeniable condition of a planet to try and salvage from our refusal to get it together.
In my professional life, I earned my living as a teacher. The most valuable lesson I learned in that capacity was to listen to what students had to say and to read carefully what they wrote. Then we both worked to make it better.
We have grave problems in our country today and competing visions about what makes a country great. I don’t think “greatness” is what any of us need right now. Boasts about making ourselves “great again” assume some kind of flawless, impossible, fantasy world. Why not be human beings who assume we are not perfect but have sense enough to try and talk to one another. No, I’m not going to leave this country. I’ll hang in here with the pretty and the ugly.
This is our country here.