Proud to be an American

This morning on NPR they interviewed three people along Highway 10, the very most eastern and southern portions of it, asking them about the upcoming presidential race and which candidates had issues that spoke to them. And then they were asked whether they believed they were leaving their children with a country that was better than when they had inherited it from their parents. One man from Jacksonville, FL said that although these times seemed pessimistic, he was proud to be an American and therefore believed that he would leave his children with the state of the nation better than when he had inherited it from his parents.

And I was struck both by his naive sense of optimism and his patriotism. Because I don't know what he meant when he said he was proud to be an American.

So here I am, asking one of those obvious questions: What does it mean to say you are proud to be an American?

I am asking this literally--in other words, I'd be interested in hearing various opinions on this. And for those of you who do not feel or may have never felt national pride, why?

Also, for any readers of this blog not from the U.S. (or for those of you who don't identify as U.S. citizens), what does national pride mean to you?

I must confess that I am not someone who readily or easily takes on group identities. I've never really been a joiner or a fan. The sports I played in high school and which I continue to play are largely individual ones: tennis, badminton, golf, running. Aside from rooting for my High School football and basketball teams, I've never really cheered for a sports team or followed a particular sport (aside from golf, and again, it's individual players I watch and I don't know outside of Tiger whether I truly root for anyone). I'm spending a lot of time on sports because I think that there is a link between patriotism and sports fandom. Each seems predicated on wearing colors and symbols of your team--and supporting that team in good times and bad. There are songs and uniforms and anthems and a "home" base. Is my lack of sports fandom related to my lack of patriotism?

I really am not a patriotic person--or at least not in the same sense as the Jacksonville man. I don't tell people that I'm proud to be an American (at least not without irony); the history of the U.S. is too fraught for me in many ways. For every national achievement there is a darker underbelly. Western expansion and the building of the Transcontinental Railroad? Yes, it opened up the continent and literally and symbolically united East and West coasts of the U.S. It also displaced several American Indian tribes and the Chinese men, whose labor was necessary for the Western portion to be built, were summarily abandoned in Utah, not even able to gain passage on the trains whose tracks they had laid (since the trains were not open for Chinese to ride in). And of course, if you look at that photo at Promontory Point Utah, the silver spike ceremony, you will see Irish laborers and Railroad barons but no Chinese men.

And yet, I also believe that the fact that I (and many others) can point to the many flaws and fallacies of the U.S. is, perhaps, the moment when I do feel the strongest connection to a national identity. I do know that the time I felt the most pride in calling myself an American came during an Asian American studies class that I took in college. The professor, a visiting scholar from UCLA who self-identified as hapa, in his case, half Japanese and half African American, on the first day of class read a conference paper he had written about the Japanese American internment. And as I listened to him I started to get so angry about the suspension of constitutional rights and the racism that Japanese Americans had faced during World War II. And when he was finished he turned to us and said that he was proud to be an American. Because he could read a paper to us criticizing a major governmental policy. Because as a hapa man he could teach us this history at a major U.S. university. Because in the U.S. we have the freedom to speak truth to power, to criticize our government when they are failing us, and to vote our conscious (even though the cynical part of me wonders what good it often does if we keep repeating our mistakes or the votes don't get counted).

It is a moment I'll always remember, and on my less cynical days, I do like to think that this freedom--to voice dissent--makes me proud to be an American.