Why I Have No National Pride

For better and worse (these days more often than not worse) I'm an American. That's my (only) citizenship. The US passport is the only one I've ever carried. 

Combine that with being a tall, white (relatively heteronormative) male and I certainly have a ton of privileges wherever I decide to live and work.  

That said, I've never felt 100% comfortable identifying solely or primarily as an American and I can't say I have any national pride to speak of. 

When I've talked or written about these sentiments in the past, I've sometimes gotten negative reactions from other Americans who think I harbor hatred or bitterness towards my country of birth.

It's true that there were times in my life, (especially high school) where I did have very poisonous feelings for the US. I've moved on though. Hatred (no matter how warranted it may or may not be) is always a waste of time. 

These days my feelings to the US alternate between ambivalence and a sense of somber duty. I try not to be the ugliest version of my country to the outside world. By sticking to what I think is ethical and by owning and challenging the ugliest parts of America, I hope I present a better face to the world than the one we have now.

Yet I don't take pride in being that American or any other kind of American. I don't feel compelled to have pride towards my nationality. This isn't because America is somehow worse than other places in the world. It's just that on a personal and more rational level I just don't think anyone should have to be proud of the country they were born or raised in.  

I grew up outside the US and I've spent a lot of my adult life living in other countries. Growing up a Third Culture Kid (someone raised outside of the home country/culture of their parents) means that I don't have the same personal attachment to the States as people raised there do. 

Not all American TCKs are like me. Some are quite comfortable living Stateside and are truly at home in America. For me though, growing up in Thailand and living abroad in other places has shown me that it's possible to be at home anywhere in the world. My formative memories from childhood and youth largely come from my time in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai and it's that place I identify most often as my hometown, when I'm asked. 

Growing up outside the US, also showed me from an early age that human beings don't need to have the same nationality, cultural background, race etc. to coexist, get along or even create real and even profoundly deep bonds. 

Nationality for me, is something incidental. I happen to be American but my being American is not something I'm especially attached too nor do I choose to let it define me even though it definitely informs my worldview.

Defining your self-worth by your nationality and more importantly assigning lesser value to other people based on theirs, is flooding our world with toxic nationalism and xenophobia. 

This toxicity was on display most recently in El Paso and I saw it earlier in the year at the terrible mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand.  I've seen it on display recently in Korea as a Korean-Japanese trade war continues to escalate. I can see it playing a part in the rhetoric of the Beijing government as it tries to repress the discontent in Hong Kong.

All too often, when national pride is invoked it's in the name of attacking an enemy. Group think sets in and blinds those who think of themselves as patriots. Problems between nations become all but impossible to solve and individual citizens are incapable of seeing any solutions. Your country and your people become the right country and the right people. Those who are not part of your country or your people are in the wrong. The facts no longer matter. You are right by default and they are wrong by default. The hypocrisies, shortcomings and faults of your own nation disappear as soon as you become wedded the idea that the other side is irredeemable because of what they are and you are the righteous because of what you are. 

To me, the saddest part of the value that so many people ascribe to their national identities, is how flimsy and arbitrary the foundations for that value is. None of us chose the countries we were born into. None of us chose which country or culture we were raised in. Yet somehow so many cling to this identity they were born to and allow it to determine their worth and the worth of others in their eyes. They do this, I think, for a pretty simple reason. It's what they know and they assume, without really consciously being aware of it, that how they were raised to see the world is the way the world truly is.

It may ultimately be, impossible, for any of us to truly escape ourselves and see other perspectives 100% clearly. However, by not wedding ourselves to the countries and nations we happen to be a part of I think we can at least begin to see each other more clearly. 

Eerily Relevant Mark Twain Quotes About America

  

(1)

'Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.'

 

 

 

(2)

'God created war so that Americans would learn geography.'

 

 (3)

 'Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.'

(4)

'Men think they think upon the great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently;they read its literature, but not that of the other side.'

 (5)

 'It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.'

(6) 

'...it is not proper to brag and boast that America is a Christian country when we all know that certainly five-sixths of our population could not enter in at the narrow gate.' 

 

(7)
'A man accustomed to American food and American domestic cookery would not starve to death suddenly in Europe; but I think he would gradually waste away, and eventually die.'

 

(8)

 'Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.'

(9)

'We have the best government that money can buy'

 (10)

 'In America, we hurry--which is well; but when the day's work is done, we go on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, we even carry our business cares to bed with us, and toss and worry over them when we ought to be restoring our racked bodies and brains with sleep. We burn up our energies with these excitements, and either die early or drop into a lean and mean old age at a time of life which they call a man's prime in Europe. When an acre of ground has produced long and well, we let it lie fallow and rest for a season; we take no man clear across the continent in the same coach he started in--the coach is stabled somewhere on the plains and its heated machinery allowed to cool for a few days; when a razor has seen long service and refuses to hold an edge, the barber lays it away for a few weeks, and the edge comes back of its own accord. We bestow thoughtful care upon inanimate objects, but none upon ourselves. What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges!'

(11) 

'If the world comes to an end, I want to be in Cincinnati. Everything comes there ten years later.'