Christmas
in July – A Skeptic is Born
When I was 5 years old, the summer going into my first
year of elementary school, GM or Chevy or some other American auto manufacturer
held a “Christmas in July” sales event akin to the contemporary
Toyotathon. Lately it seems like every
month is Toyotathon and every sales event is a once in a lifetime special
offer, but such is the way with American marketing. Make the consumer want it and need it, then
tell them they can’t have it (unless they act
now!) Christmas in July TV
commercials featured Santa, all decked out in his customary wardrobe, plus
sunglasses and a sunscreen nose. As is
typical with Christmas-related car commercials, a fleet of sporty new vehicles
had usurped the place of Dasher, Vixen and the rest of Santa’s reindeer fleet. I have often wondered why no car companies ever
made a car called a Blitzen. I would
have bought an Oldsmobile Blitzen based on the name alone. I doubt car companies have a guy that gets
paid six figures to come up with goofy names for their automobiles, but if they
do, and if I was that guy, I’d come out with a new reindeer car every Christmas. My marketing scheme would culminate with the
ultimate (and most expensive) luxury automobile, named (obviously) Rudolph. The Oldsmobile Rudolph. That’s catchy enough for auto marketing. It’s better than the Cutlass, which sounds
more like a nickname for Jack the Ripper than an American made automobile, and
that’s one of the bestselling American made cars ever. Christianity is huge in America, Christmas is
even bigger and the Rudolph would sell.
GM didn’t need a bailout; GM needed more reindeer-names. It doesn’t even have to be a new car every
year. Instead of calling the “Supreme”
version of the Comet the Comet Supreme, call it the Vixen.
My five year old brain watched some obese geriatric actor
in a Santa suit with sunglasses and sunscreen nose tell me to have a “Merry ‘Christmas
in July.’” He assured me that I’d been
good this half-year and therefore should treat myself or the one I love to a
brand new Chevy Constellation for only $199 a month. That got me thinking. Had
I been good this year? Was the real
Santa watching me right now? According
to the song and the dogma, when he isn’t staring at me in bed he at least knows
when I’m awake…for goodness sake. But
how? I didn’t see him there. Once when I was younger (it was probably the
Christmas right before “Christmas in July”) I tried to convince myself that
when I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye, it was trailed by a
red coat. Santa had been watching me the
old fashioned way: by breaking into my house and peeking around the corner of
the area between kitchen and living room.
But I knew it wasn’t really him; that was impossible because that would
mean an infinite (or at least a few hundred million) Santas existed to be able
to spy on every child in the world physically.
He must’ve used remote surveillance.
I hadn’t seen any evidence of him – no reindeer prints in
the snow on the roof and no sleigh tracks up there either, and I’d definitely
never seen reindeer or sleds fly, and I didn’t see how (or why) some ageless
old man in a suit could know everything about me and every other child on the
planet. And how come he didn’t do
anything for my parents? They were good,
weren’t they? As far as I was concerned
they were better than I was. I never saw
my dad lie about breaking a window or heard about him splashing three inches
worth of water out of the bathtub all over the bathroom floor as a side effect
of trying to create a wave pool. So what
gives? Sure, they don’t want or need the
new Ghostbusters ghost trap or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles play truck, but
can’t Santa’s elves make grown-up stuff too?
At what age does Santa stop caring about you?
And about those elves…I never got a wooden train set or
truck for Christmas; I got real live in-the-box toys. With the manufacturer labels, Styrofoam
packaging and everything. Were the elves
that good that they could create exact replicas of NERF footballs and the packaging and the instruction booklet
and convince the genuine toy companies that they weren’t infringing on
copyright? Something didn’t add up. Someone was lying or at least withholding the
truth.
I had to know.
Mid-afternoon on a 90 degree day in July I walked right up to my mom,
sat her down and said that I needed to know.
I didn’t want any hypotheticals, I didn’t want to talk about “belief,” I
wanted answers.
“What do you think?” She asked.
“I don’t see how there’s any way; it doesn’t make any
sense. I think there is no Santa and it’s
you and dad.”
“You’re right.
Don’t tell you sister.” But it
was too late, my sister (15 months my senior, but we might as well have been
twins) had overheard part of the conversation.
She knew of my newly discovered Santa-agnosticism and she decided she
wanted to know too. I don’t remember if
I told her directly or if my mom did, but I like to think I told her.
“Don’t tell the other kids at school. You have to let them believe. Don’t tell Jimmy either.” Jimmy is my younger
brother and he was 3 at the time. Even
at 5 I knew you’d have to be a real asshole to ruin Christmas for a three year
old (or your five year old classmates), so I went on pretending. I never said I believed in Santa or pretended
to believe in Santa, I just kept my mouth shut.
Mostly.
Eventually there comes a point where encouraging Santa
belief is creepy and no longer just letting your child believe something
fun. It reaches a point where it’s
lying, disingenuous and damaging. Almost
everyone had that one kid (or small handful of kids) in their class who
believed in Santa for way too long.
Usually it led to teasing and ostracism every December. I had a friend who believed in Santa until 6th
grade. Late 6th grade too –
like mid-April 6th grade.
There was nothing wrong with him intellectually or developmentally – he
was a normal 12 year old…who also happened to still believe in Santa. He believed because his parents kept lying to
him. They didn’t just let him believe,
they told him to believe. In 5th grade when I got really fed up with
the charade, I flat out told him there is no Santa Claus and that our
classmates were starting to think that he was weird for believing it. He told his parents of my blasphemy and they
told him I was wrong. That’s always
struck me as creepy. At that age your
parents are the ultimate authority. What
they say is infallibly correct. There’s
something very weird about parents who after a certain age continually lie to
their children about the existence of Santa (or the Easter Bunny or any other
make-believe childhood hero) and they are doing a great disservice to their
children. Interestingly, his parents
were very religious. Like, “god is the
reason (the only reason) you hit that
home run, so you’d better thank him or you’ll never do it again” religious. Possibly (probably) coincidence, but once
you’ve spent the first 11 years of your life believing in (and being lied to
about) the existence of a supernatural being that you could actively prove did
not exist (or at least prove that he did not visit your house every December 25th),
it makes it very difficult to ever stray from believing in the existence of a supernatural
being that you cannot actively prove does not exist. Especially considering that, unlike Santa, he
is spiritual (rather than physical) by nature.
My initial reaction to the truth was parental
admiration. My parent’s stock went up by
an order of magnitude in my eyes on that mid-July day. The first thing I said (my mom reminds me and
the rest of the family of this story every Christmas) was, “so wait…it was you and dad who bought me all that
stuff?! Thanks!” (She never mentions that I actually said
“thanks,” but this is my story and I know
I was a polite little kid, so I said it.)
My younger brother’s Santa story is funnier. He was 6 or 7 and some kids at school had
been talking about it, so he came home and he asked my mom. When she told him there is no Santa, his
reaction was melodramatic grief.
“Everything I have ever been told is a lie!” he wailed. “I’ll never
believe anything again!” That’s some pretty good stuff for a second
grader. He should have gone into
acting. But those tears were real and he
really was devastated. For me, it was
the opposite. I was more relieved and
satiated. There was no Santa because the
world didn’t work that way. There is no
man who flies around the world in one night in a sleigh driven by reindeer (who
also fly) with an unimaginably huge bag of toys for every (well-behaved) child
in the world. That worked for me. I didn’t think of it in quite those terms
when I was five, but to me that made sense.
My brother added a vengeful (and tearful) “where’s Kerry?!
I’m telling Kerry!” during his emotional breakdown. His first reaction was to weep at the loss of
a childhood icon and at being lied to.
He was understandably upset that the world didn’t work the way he
thought it did. His second reaction was
to ruin it for my younger sister, who was the only remaining member of the
household who still believed in Santa.
That’s hilarious to me. She would
have been 4 or 5 at the time, and my mom stopped him from ruining her Christmas
too, but it’s interesting where he was coming from. He wanted to do it out of anger – in his mind
at that moment Christmas was forever ruined for him and that was unacceptable,
and he wanted to bring someone else down with him. For me that need to inform still existed, but
not out of vengeance or any type of vindictiveness, but because it seemed like
the right thing to do. I never did tell
anyone that Santa Claus does not exist (barring the incident in 5th
grade, when a friend was being mocked for it) because I could appreciate the
difference between a holiday legend that adults who know better tell kids for a
variety of reasons (not the least of which is to get them to behave and finish
their broccoli) and actively lying, believing something fantastical or simply
repeating misinformation and urban legend unintentionally.
I don’t want to try to pretend that at the age of 5 I took
realizing and then confirming the truth about Santa Claus, applied it to every
area of life, and became an atheist and a skeptic, because that is far from the
truth. But it is a good introduction. It
was a long road from July of 1989 until officially considering myself either
(or even considering the possibility of either), but on that day the seeds of
skepticism were planted and a skeptic was born.
The
Face in the Blanket
Right around the time I finally broke down and told my 5th
grade friend that there is no Santa Claus (and his parents promptly discredited
me as an infidel), my Social Studies teacher decided he was sick of teaching
Social Studies and it was time for us to watch some supernatural
documentaries. I don’t remember the
exact circumstances of it, but I do remember vividly that the videos we watched
had nothing to do with the Fertile Crescent or Mesopotamia or anything else we
were learning in class. I also don’t
remember what pseudo-academic channel originally aired these “documentaries”
and I haven’t been able to find them since, and I’ve looked hard, but I’m guessing
it was National Geographic (they have no qualms about airing that nonsense Ancient Aliens series and presenting it
as fact and/or something seriously debated and questioned among archaeologists,
paleontologists and other scientists, so I don’t feel bad for blaming them for
this - even if it turns out I’m wrong and it was a different station). This was my last year in a public school
setting, but I think it’s important to note that the specific story I’m about
to relate wasn’t specifically the reason for my parent’s decision to enroll me
in Catholic school, it serves as a prime example of public elementary school job-security-as-tenure
gone wild.
The first show we watched was on the Bermuda
Triangle. It was presented in typical sensational
hyperbolic television fashion, without any rebuttal from the other side. The hypothesis was that the Bermuda Triangle
was a relatively small area in the Atlantic Ocean where an unusually large
number of people have disappeared forever.
The program gave multiple explanations for the disappearances, every one
of which was supernatural. One posited
that it was due to leftover technologies from the “lost city” of Atlantis
buried deep below the triangle. Aliens
and UFO activity were another “scientific explanation” offered by the
experts. Your tax dollars at work. A grown man who was paid good money (he was
probably in his late 50s then, so I’m betting that adjusted for inflation, in
New York State public schools, he was probably pulling down 75-80 grand in 2012
dollars…plus another 12-15 grand in benefits) was teaching young,
impressionable 11 and 12 year olds that the Bermuda Triangle is supernatural in
nature and possibly related to the lost city of Atlantis. Brilliant.
And the concept terrified me. At
that age, teachers were right up there with parents in their
infallibility. Plus National Geographic
was scientific, right? And these
“experts” on the program were scientists who had spent their whole lives
studying this stuff. None of them would
lie to me and this was not a horror program, this was science; it wasn’t
designed to scare me (and it really didn’t scare most of the other kids in the
class), it just happened to scare me
as a side effect. So it had to be fact; aliens were real and
were responsible for the disappearance of hundreds, if not thousands, of
people. I lived nowhere near the Bermuda
Triangle, but I was sure I was next. I
did not sleep well that night.
The next day, my Social Studies teacher was still in
babysitter mode rather than paid educator and he decided it was time to
introduce a little religion into our public school, masquerading as
science. I’m not talking about any type
of Creationism or Intelligent Design argument, no no – this was another
pseudo-scientific documentary. This time
the subject was The Shroud of Turin. This
particular program introduced our impressionable and developing brains to the
thesis that Jesus Christ was real, he was magical, he was possibly (probably)
the son of god, and after he died he rose from the dead and the “energy” from
the resurrection had left a daguerreotype imprint of his face and body on the
shroud he was buried in. Not only that,
but we somehow managed to find the cloth (over a thousand years after the fact,
something the documentary neglected to mention) and could now subject it to testing. If you’ve ever seen the Shroud of Turin you
know it’s not exactly flattering to the late JC, and it definitely isn’t
calming, as some Christians try to claim.
And the photographic negative images that the show kept using were horrifying. Those black and white images of a lifeless
face imprinted themselves on my brain and refused to leave. And they terrified me. I’m still not sure why; I was raised Catholic
and in 5th grade was still an unquestioning believer, shouldn’t the
verification of the existence and resurrection of Jesus Christ be a source of
great comfort and joy? It wasn’t. I couldn’t sleep – I saw that hauntingly
expressionless black and white face everywhere.
In the dim light of my bedroom, I saw it forming in posters on my walls
and in wood grain patters on my bed.
That image wasn’t benevolent and it was out to get me.
I
don’t even remember the specifics of the Shroud of Turin documentary. I just remember the frightening image and
that the overall point was that numerous scientific tests had shown that there
was a very high probability that the Shroud was authentic. I also remember that my teacher strongly
agreed with the program’s conclusion. The
second night of seeing Jesus’ creepy shroud face every time I closed my eyes
and not being able to sleep because of it, I realized I had to do
something. I went to my parents and told
them about it. I didn’t even remember
the name of the burial cloth. I called
it “the face in the blanket. You know –
Jesus’ face from when he was buried and rose from the dead…” Luckily they knew what I was talking about
and they (two lifelong Catholics) assured me that it was nonsense. They didn’t try to tell me that the (alleged)
face of Jesus should bring me joy instead of fear or some other religious jive;
they instead told me it was a hoax. My
dad told me he didn’t know what “science” show I had seen, but that he knew it
wasn’t real science. I felt better, but
still pretty uneasy. Although sleep came
much easier that night, the face still wouldn’t leave my mind.
Arriving
home from work the next day, my dad took a library book out of his briefcase
and handed it to me. “Read this,” he
said.
“Looking for a Miracle” I read
aloud. “What’s this?”
“This
will explain why your teacher and that show are wrong about the Shroud of
Turin,” he replied.
The
Shroud of Turin was only one chapter in the book, which featured a full survey
of alleged miracles, magical icons, weeping religious relics, reports of
stigmata, and other similar fare. I
opened to the chapter on the Shroud of Turin and read it three times, each time
growing more assured that this thing was a hoax and I had no reason to be
afraid. The ghostly Jesus face was still
in my mind, but it lost its power to scare me because it wasn’t real. Again, this is all a bit paradoxical for a 10
year old Catholic, but for me at the time believing in an unseen god in the sky
was fine – ghosts (and ghostly images) here on Earth were not.
I
remember being angry. My entire class
and I were exposed to this Shroud of Turin business in a Social Studies
class. After having read Joe Nickell’s
accounts and descriptions of what real scientists, historians, archaeologists,
proper testing of the shroud by proper scientists, and even religious clergy
had to say in Looking for a Miracle,
I realized that not only was there no way that the Shroud of Turin was
supernatural, but there was also no way it was even the authentic burial shroud
of Jesus Christ. It wasn’t only bad
science, it was bad history, bad archaeology, bad everything. It was even bad religion in the sense that if
it’s fake (which it is) then it’s a false icon and it’s blasphemous. I again felt the need to explain all this to
my classmates. This wasn’t Santa Claus,
this was real stuff. We were being given
inaccurate misconceptions, myths and flat out lies as truth and fact. This time, I was going to set everything
straight.
But
the next day at lunch when I started telling my classmates about the truth, no
one seemed to care. It didn’t matter to
them at all. The few students who did
care only cared to challenge me, one of them even saying (I really do remember
this verbatim) – “Innocent until proven guilty – it’s right until you prove
it’s wrong.” I tried telling him that
the opposite is true – it’s wrong until (or unless) the evidence shows it’s
right (my 5th grade version of the scientific method) – but he
wasn’t having it. Now even some of the
other kids started to jump in (the ones who “didn’t care”) to agree with
him. It wasn’t about supernatural faces
in a cloth or alien abductions in the North Atlantic; it was about the truth
and reality. No one was on my side. It wasn’t a big deal and the whole thing blew
over within a minute and we were back to talking about how many swear words
were on the new Green Day album and whose older brother had to album so we
could listen to them on repeat, but being on the minority side of debate about
supernatural forces, science, truth, and reality would become a common theme
for me.
That
Joe Nickell book was my first introduction to formal skepticism and the idea
that claims of paranormal ability, supernatural forces and pseudoscience could
be subjected to real scientific scrutiny.
It taught me to question claims and to examine the evidence for what’s
actually there versus what we hope is (or think it would be “cool” if it was)
there.
The Majority of Americans Can’t Be Wrong, Can They?
We
are a supernatural nation. Considerably
less so than many other countries, yes, but according to numerous polls, a
considerable majority of Americans believe in all kinds of weird supernatural
stuff. I’m not sure exactly how these
polls define “belief” (or if they even define it at all), but I define it as an
active psychological state in which one holds something to be true. “I don’t know/maybe/there could be/it’s
possible” is not belief. If you don’t
know, you don’t believe. By definition
you can’t believe if you don’t know. I’m
not sure how many of the 73% of Americans who said (in the findings of a recent
Gallup poll) that they believe in some type of paranormal/supernatural
phenomenon (including ESP, ghosts, and telepathy, but not god – god wasn’t considered “supernatural” in this poll…)
really meant “I don’t know for sure.” Based on experience, I’m guessing very
few. In fact, other polls measuring
belief in various phenomena have included an “I don’t know” column and, like
any good third party candidate, “I don’t know” consistently scores very
low.
Despite
the insistence of members of the religious right, America was not “founded on
the principles of Christianity.” If
anything, it was founded on principles of Paganism, Freemasonry, (not the paranoid conspiracy theory “New
World Order” kind of Freemasonry) and liberty.
However, despite the insistence of members of atheist movements and
secular groups, it is technically
accurate to say that America is a Christian nation in the sense that a healthy
majority (coincidentally, also 73%) of Americans identify as Christian. We generally consider Iraq and Turkey to be
Muslim nations, but officially they are actually secular. We just call them Muslim because a huge
majority (99.8% of Iraqis and 98.6% of Turks) identify themselves as
Muslim. If 73 percent of Americans
identify themselves as Christian, technically we’re a Christian nation, even if
we do not have an official, state-sponsored religion. While we do not have an official national
religion, we do hold to some peculiar traditions and religious tendencies on an
official level. In courtrooms, we place
our hands on Bibles, swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing
but the truth so help us god – implying that morality and god are inseparable
and apparently believing that this hollow act of placing one’s hand on a book
and promising not to lie will make someone tell the truth, as opposed to just
saying, “if you’re caught lying during this questioning, you’ll be found guilty
of contempt of court and/or perjury and could go to jail.” The whole exercise is rather silly anyway
considering the myriad gods and deities that exist in popular and historical
religious mythologies. So help me which god? The Old Testament vengeful god of the
Hebrews? The New Testament “father of
Jesus Christ” god? Muhammad? Thor?
Not to mention that if I don’t believe in the Bible, then “swearing” on
it makes as much sense and holds as much weight as swearing on any other
mundane old book.
We
hold other peculiar traditions for a nation that holds “separation of church
and state” as a guiding principle (that phrase never actually appears in the
Constitution, but was actually stated by Thomas Jefferson in his now famous
1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, but this is the essence of the
Establishment Clause). Since 1956, the
national motto of the United States is “in god we trust.” This motto was figuratively reaffirmed by Congress
in 2011 in a whopping 396 to 9 vote. Separation of a specific church or religion and state may exist in the United
States, but separation of magical thinking and magical beliefs and state
certainly does not. We also went ahead
and starting printing this non-denominational, but still highly religious motto
on our paper money in 1957 (it had been on coinage since the mid-1800s), another
peculiar act, if it is indeed “in [the Christian god that 73 percent of
Americans identify with] we trust,” because according to scripture, that god
doesn’t like money (although his churches certainly seem to.)
Perhaps
most questioningly, we debate over reality and try to change and control
reality democratically. School-board
debates in Cobb County, Georgia; Topeka, Kansas; and a handful of other areas
across the country over the teaching of the religious based intelligent design
in public science classrooms have shown our strange view of reality. We can debate until we’re blue in the face
over evolution vs. intelligent design and we can put it to a vote over who
believes what, but in the end, reality doesn’t care. If, during the next statewide election, New
York State decided to add a proposition to the ballot that said, “we affirm and
believe that the Earth is the center of the Universe and all celestial bodies
revolve around it,” and the vast majority of New Yorkers voted in favor of it,
nothing has actually changed (except maybe the nation’s view of New York
State’s level of education). The
geocentric proposition “passing” by a large majority doesn’t change the actual
nature of the universe. The Earth is
not the center of the universe. That’s
the reality.
This
is not to say that evolution or Einstein’s general and special relativity or
anything else is the ultimate and unquestioning truth. They could absolutely be wrong as well. The point is that even though the vast
majority of modern scientists believe that evolution and Einstein and a whole
score of other principles and theories are fairly accurate descriptions of the
natural world, they could absolutely be wrong and if they are, the nature of
reality doesn’t change. As another
example: either an individual is male or female. Voting on the sex of an individual doesn’t
change the true gender and that reality is not democratic. In America we seem to have this strange view
that reality is democratic and that if enough people believe or vote on the
reality of something, it becomes the truth.
It’s a common argument against skepticism and atheism: “the vast
majority of Americans believe in some kind of god, and the majority (73
percent, remember) believe in some type of additional supernatural or
paranormal phenomenon. The majority of
Americans can’t be wrong, can they?”
They can. In many cases they are,
and just because a majority believe (or claim to believe) in something, that
doesn’t make it true (just ask the naked Emperor.)
Born in the USA
Have
you ever really listened to the lyrics in Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the
USA”? It’s played at patriotic rallies,
baseball games and Memorial Day parades all across the country. It probably gets played over one million
times across the country at various locations every single year on the fourth
of July. If Bruce is getting royalties
per play, he should really trade in his “t-shirt and jeans working guy” look
for some six-figure Versace suits. The
song is supposed to (and somehow, actually does) inspire patriotic feelings of
America-love and how great the country is and chants of USA! USA! USA! But once you’ve really read the lyrics, it
feels kind of strange hearing it at “patriotic” rallies and Yankees games. The only lyric the average American knows is
the chorus and the rest is just poppy filler.
The real lyrics evoke images of a war-hungry, heartless nation that’s as
keen to kill the “yellow man” (direct quote from Bruce) as it is to ignore the
kids that they send to actually do the killing who get royally screwed up, both
physically and mentally, if they make
it home. It’s a song about killing
people different than us, for reasons we either don’t or can’t understand (and
probably don’t want to), and then trying to live with the consequences. It’s all because you were born in the USA,
and that’s just how we do business. Not
exactly Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” an equally goofy American “rally
song” but for completely different reasons.
Although
most people probably wouldn’t admit it, I bet they have similar feelings about
America as the disenfranchised speaker in Springsteen’s song. Not necessarily about the oversimplification
of war as a violent and fruitless mess (although that’s pretty spot on for Vietnam)
or the criticisms leveled at the United States, but most would probably agree
in the exact same, “I was born in the USA” kind of mentality. It’s that same mentality that inspires them
to sing-along with the song and wave their flags in ardent patriotism to a song
generally critical of what they’re rallying for. Politicians and pundits constantly prattle on
about how America is “the greatest country on Earth,” which always reminds me
of parents with a double-take inducingly ugly baby who think he’s the most
beautiful creature on Earth. Sure, to them he’s beautiful. He’s theirs – they made him. No parent wants to admit their kid is
ugly. Similarly, no civilized country’s
citizens want to admit they might not be the best. “America is the greatest nation on
Earth.” Greatest in terms of what,
exactly? In education we’re ranked 13th,
and that’s according to the very generous “education index.” If you look at test scores on standardized
tests measuring reading, mathematics, and science, the United States ranks 33rd,
27th and 22nd, respectively. That’s not the greatest. In terms of freedom, we’re 10th on
the index of economic freedom and 7th in terms of civil
liberties. That’s not the greatest. GDP per capita? Depending on what source you look at, we’re 8th,
6th or 9th. Not
the greatest. There is one significant
factor that the United States consistently ranks number one in, and that’s the
size of the military in terms of spending.
We account for 41% of the world’s share of military spending. Almost half of the money in the world that is
spent on military is spent by the United States. The next closest is China, at 8.2%. We also spend the most money per capita. China has about 1 billion more citizens than the United States and
we spend over 500 billion dollars more than they do on military expenses
(adjusted to like currencies – I’m not comparing dollars to renminbi here). Maybe we’re the “greatest country on Earth”
because we can blast to pieces anyone who disagrees with us.
Outside
of the United States, almost no one considers the United States to be the
greatest country in the world. Generally,
only other Americans consider America to be the “greatest country in the world”. It’s like the parent who thinks their kid is
the greatest ballplayer on the team and wants the coach tarred, feathered, and
thrown in jail for benching little Samuel.
And that’s the problem; that’s the “Born in the USA” syndrome. And similar to the hypothetical “geocentric
proposition” passed by New York State that I mentioned in an earlier section,
everyone deciding that America is the best does not magically make it
true. How many of us would honestly “love”
America or become American citizens if we weren’t born here? That’s my worry about my own American
identity. I was born here so I’m
“American”. It’s really all I know. But if I was born in Canada (because it’s
geographically closest) or China (because it’s the mathematically the most
likely), would I be saying that Canada/China is the “greatest nation on
Earth”? Sure, there are a number of
poverty stricken and severely oppressed countries where yes, without a doubt,
most people would leave the second they got the chance, but out of the large
number of developed countries, what makes the United States so great? Many would argue the ideas of freedom and
liberty make the United States so great.
That was true, but how many of
those ideals still truly exist in the same strident form that they did when
“give me liberty or give me death” was not just a catchy hyperbole, it was a
literal demand? Now we fight bloody
battles against our own citizens over what they choose to put into their own
bodies (the drug war), we fight bloody wars overseas for phantom weapons of
mass destruction or oil, and we haven’t had a free market probably ever but
definitely since the New Deal. We gladly
hand our 4th Amendment rights over every time we fly and in a number
of other situations in the name of “safety” or “fighting terrorism” and show
little to no concern for the ever increasing presence of the Nanny State.
I
don’t think I’ve ever specifically identified myself as an American. If I did, it was way down on the list and to
me has always been more of a circumstance of birth than anything else. I’m an American in the same way as I have
blue eyes and am an uncle. It’s just
something that happened due to circumstance, either genetic or familial. But that really is one of the things that
make America “great”; the (still mostly free) marketplace of ideas that exists
all across the country. That really
doesn’t exist in a great number of other places and in many other countries you
could be jailed, beaten or put to death for speaking out against the leaders or
state-religion. But that’s just
comparison and relativity though.
America is great because it doesn’t stifle free speech (mostly) and
allows you to believe what you want (mostly).
That’s giving America credit for not doing something. North Korea is worse than America because of
the ways they oppress their citizens, but should America get credit for not
doing the same thing? It’s like saying
that the creepy looking guy on the subway is a great person for not violently
robbing you because another creepy looking guy in a different subway car does violently rob people. The actions of the other creep don’t make
this creep less creepy. Maybe he was
going to rob you at the next stop but you got off at a particularly busy
station. Or maybe he was going to rob
you but something about you specifically kept him from doing it, like maybe you
look similar to his sister so he didn’t rob you, but he did rob a different
person who looked like someone who used to bully him in high school. You don’t know. The point is that he should
get no credit or be considered “great” (or even good) for not doing something
horrible.
On
the other side of that same coin, America (or any government) should not be
given credit for or be praised for things that already exist. For example, many (myself included) are quite
pleased with New York State for granting homosexuals the same right to marry as
heterosexuals. That’s fantastic. But that’s a right that already should have
existed; New York is being praised for once being homophobic, exclusionary, and
discriminatory, but not doing it anymore.
That’s not something they should be praised for. That’s like praising your assailant for no
longer assaulting you. The same thing is
true for civil rights. It’s fantastic
that African Americans have the same rights as everyone else in the United
States and thankfully we’ve evolved enough that I believe that very few people
would argue against it. The problem is
that African Americans always had
those same inalienable and undeniable rights as everyone else. Those rights were forcibly and violently
taken away from them and then slowly given back after much politicking and
violence. Repealing the racist and
disgusting Jim Crow laws in the 1960s was met with great praise (rightfully so),
but today a good number of Americans look upon that with a sense of national
pride and cite that as a reason that America is great. Once violently enslaving, oppressing, and
ignoring the rights of an entire race of human beings and then deciding to no
longer do that and to now treat them as human beings is not “great.” I don’t believe America (or any other government)
should get credit for giving back rights that they once violently stripped
away. Gay marriage and civil rights are
two extreme examples of the multitude of things that already exist (like “free
speech”) and are attributed with great thanks and pride to government for
granting.
So
I don’t know if I’m American because I was born here or if I’m American because
I really like America. Certainly I stand
behind the ideas in the Constitution and celebrate them daily. Compared to quite a number of other
countries, I would definitely say that I did hit it lucky by being born in
America. My concern is that those ideas
are gradually becoming a small voice in the national consciousness and the
worse off the rest of the world is, the better we think we are. The government of North Korea committing some
abhorrent act against its own citizens or enacting laws creating an even more
oppressive style of government does not somehow make America freer, but a troubling
number of Americans (rightfully) look upon them with pity but (oddly) look upon
Uncle Sam with admiration and a sense of national pride just for not doing the
same. I fear that for too many
Americans, their national identity is simply unshakable pride and unquestioning
loyalty to their government, and for no real legitimate reason other than
circumstance of birth.
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