What I Do Love About America

On why loving something matters.

Photo by Janay Peters on Unsplash

There is a good chance I will not post again before this July 4th, the one that celebrates 250 years. So I want to write briefly about what I do love about America.

I love that America is an idea that keeps germinating, a cutting taken from someone else’s hedge, from a tradition that once wanted only to trim the power of its kings and queens and had no intention of growing this wild. The strange thing about the cutting is that it survived. It survived 250 years of its own gardeners taking turns at the roots, and it is still here, still reaching for a light nobody planted it to reach. I love that some Americans try to protect the freedom to speak and to assemble, which is really the freedom to push the civic space past where the last generation left it, further than the men who wrote the documents would have recognized or, in many cases, allowed.

I love the ancestors who made citizenship something more than an assertion on an old parchment. Because that is all it was at the start. Frederick Douglass stood in Rochester in 1852 and told a room full of people celebrating this day exactly what the day meant to a man still legally owned, and the power of that speech was that he was holding the country to its own promise and not rejecting it. The Black, White, Muslim, Jewish, Queer, Disabled, Young, and Older who came after him did the same thing with their bodies instead of their words. They closed the distance between what the documents said and what the country actually did, unevenly, at enormous cost, and never all the way. The rights we treat as background were once somebody’s foreground. Somebody bled to move them there.

I love MLB baseball on summer nights, even when the Orioles test the outer limits of that love. I love Hollywood blockbusters in a cold theater on a hot evening. And I love the American cookout, which is the only genuinely democratic institution we have left, a place where the Caribbean aunt, the Midwestern uncle, and the cousin who insists the burnt burgers are “seasoned that way on purpose” all answer to the same folklore about who is and is not allowed to touch the grill.

I love that in America, a person can set out to become a better version of himself, and that the country will at least pretend to let him. And I love that the same instinct built roads long enough to carry a family from a Mississippi they were fleeing to a Baltimore they had never seen, prairie one day and desert mountains the next, freedom measured in the plain fact of being able to leave.

I love America. That is precisely why I push it toward its best possible version, and I push hardest when it strays furthest from it. The cutting is still alive after 250 years, still reaching.

Tending a thing and loving a thing turn out to be the same act.

Tending to this space is my act.