Americanness

Sedona, Arizona 2001

I'm not sure yet what I want to write here. So I will just begin.

I have never felt so American as since I have moved to a foreign country. Doesn't sound like a profound statement, does it...kind of a no-brainer. So, to explain...I always thought that as the granddaughter of two lines of immigrant families, Irish and Italian, that I still must have roots in Europe. And having traveled to Italy in 1969, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and then the move later in 2005, I thought I was prepared for what has turned out to be a monumental change. Angel and I always say, Moving to a foreign country is not for the faint of heart.

Nothing prepares one for living abroad. You have to be retrofitted after you arrive. When you are a tourist, you have the luxury of seeing only that which you wish to see. You can romanticize, gloss over, be in denial about just about anything. When you live, in my case, in Italy, the otherness of the place is in your face each and every day. I may as well have landed on a different planet.

I was a somewhat jaded American. Didn't like some aspects of my culture, what I thought I saw it becoming, so I became intolerant. Still don't like the celebrity worship, of which I am critical, pervading American society. I really hate what has happened to the governance of my country, but at least as a student (in college and in my life) of political science and history, I know that there are broader canvases being painted than a few years of Bushies can't destroy. I worry about apathy and the dumbing down of the majority of the media.

I had ceased identifying with my own tribe. So I thought that leaving this all behind was the right step for me, until I read a scathing diatribe against America and Americans in general, full of cheap shots at my fellow countrymen and women. The fact that it was written by an American who had never lived abroad for an extended period made me start to question my own assumptions. I didn't want to think that I was like this person. Reading the diatribe, I heard myself saying, No, that's not right; no, it's not like that.

I had to ask myself, where is my compassion, my understanding, my acceptance of my fellows? And I had to answer that I hadn't done enough to cultivate those parts of my character.

Congruent with all of this, I could not help but observe all the crazy little things in Italian daily life and the bureacracy that would never be tolerated in hyperefficient America. And I began to appreciate more the patchwork that is my home country. Now that I'm in Italy, I seem to be reclaiming my own identity as an American, when I thought I came here to reclaim my lost identity as the granddaughter of Italians. From the far side of the Atlantic, I can now see America in all its complex beauty...I wasn't able to see the forest because I was lost in the trees. I can also appreciate Italy more because now I know where I belong. I know now that this is a sojourn and I will take all the best out of it that I can.