What Does It Mean...?

Sometimes, when I am in the mood to be active and when it is nice outside, I take a walk. Sometimes, I go out to the historic part of town and just walk. Shortly after the return from Pennsylvania and Ohio, I took a walk alone with my thoughts. I had barely been walking for five minutes when a person started to keep pace with me. He turned to me and said, "Excuse me. I am doing research for a class and I was wondering if I could ask you some questions."

Having been a sociology major, and done my fair share of clandestine and open observation, I agreed. We continued to walk down the street as he explained that he was in an Eastern Asia studies class and needed to practice field research. He asked me to recall my past 24 hours, using as many action verbs as possible, so I got to tell the story of the epic road trip home. Then he asked a couple questions: 1) What does it mean to me to be American? and 2) As speculation, what would it mean to be Japanese American?

If you have been reading a while, you may have seen my meditations on patriotism. In any other conversation, I would have commented that I don't feel a strong identity as an American and that, more or less, I dislike the mainstream ideas associated with "American" : obnoxious cultural elitism, "freedom" in an absence of truth, a sense of entitlement, consumerist values. (Okay, that is the cynical approach to what it means to be "American." Newsflash -- I'm cynical.)

I didn't want to tell a perfect stranger that I don't like being American. If there is anything more smugly superior than my idea of an "American," it is a person who is smugly superior to "Americans." So, standing in city where our country was born, I considered the question seriously. As much as I dislike the left's and right's manner of hijacking my national identity, I am American. It is a huge part of my identity, so huge that most of the time, I don't see how much of me it affects. But it's there, because I have lived my entire life in America, in an American family, attending (public) American schools, watching the American political system. So I thought.

I told the student that to me, being American meant having certain rights and freedoms. But with those freedoms, I have certain responsibilities. So being American means that I have all the freedoms our founding fathers gained for us. But American isn't perfect, so I have the responsibility as well to effect change in our society. The founding fathers secured for us all these rights and freedoms not in order to create the perfect government, but in order that future generations might have recourse against a government which they knew would be imperfect. In the back of my mind, I was thinking of G.K. Chesterton. I've only read one of his books (he's on my list, but JPII is taking a long time right now!), but one part struck me: being patriotic, he explained, is not unconditional support for anything your country does, but rather caring enough about your country to want to correct its flaws.

As for what it meant to be Japanese American, I offered a few speculations, that were really nothing more than speculations. He then asked what I thought it would mean to be Japanese in Japan. Again, nothing more than speculations, in light of different history, culture, and value systems. We chatted and walked back down the streets, until we reached a parting place.