Eleventh Star
07-27-2011, 09:32 AM
This morning as I was browsing I found a thread referencing a lewrockwell.com article "The Most Dangerous Word in the World." It's "we", with the author pointing out how "we" is used to coerce people and justify the worst excesses of collectivism. It struck me how often I'd heard "we" or "Americans" in the speeches of Bush and Obama in the past decade and how uneasy it made me. Together with the folksiness and synthetic familiarity that a president seems required to use, it felt like being stuffed into a Norman Rockwell painting against my will. Because by God, "we" are all patriotic Americans and "we" will get behind whatever great endeavor President _____ wanted "us" to undertake.
My family moved to the United States from the Philippines in 1999, when I was still a child. My mother instilled in me a deep and abiding love for the culture and language of my birthplace. I still call myself a Filipino and I'll be one for the rest of my life. As such, I wasn't very moved by Presidential rhetoric about community and what "we" would do and what "our" future was. If anything, the barrage of faux sentimentality turned me off to identifying as an American.
Growing up here gave me more reasons to maintain that attitude. It was always a little entertaining checking the box for race on surveys or applications. Geographically, the Philippines is in Asia but has a strong Hispanic element in its culture. The vast majority of Filipinos are Catholic and many have Spanish surnames. That makes us not entirely Asian yet not entirely Hispanic either. But according to Uncle Sam, you're White, Black, Hispanic, or Asian. That was the first and most benign example I noticed of a government that categorized and de-personalized its people while lecturing them about how they were all part of a big, happy family. If you had any defining qualities, it wasn't for where you were from, what you believed, or what you did. It was if you were part of some interest group, like the middle class, working families, single mothers, and any kind of group that defined itself by relation to government support or privilege.
That was before Ron Paul. The good doctor removed the veil of doublespeak that hid the real America from me. And his supporters were real people with human faces, people who defined themselves by support for him and his principles and not by their membership in some government defined group. People who had interesting pasts and ideas, who were independent, and wanted to stay that way. People who were proud of where they came from in Oklahoma, New Hampshire, Utah, or wherever, and didn't want to run-off to New York or California. For the record, I live in NY and appreciate it not because it has "the greatest city in the world" but because it's where I grew up and my new home.
That's why I'll be happy, proud even, to call myself an American in Ron Paul's America. I'd stand before the world as an individual, free to make my identity as I see fit. My humanity wouldn't be distilled into a number or box to check. It would be the America I envisioned before coming here, one where a person could go anywhere and do anything as long as it didn't hurt anyone else. There'd be room for me in such a place, room for me to be myself. And that's what America's really all about.
My family moved to the United States from the Philippines in 1999, when I was still a child. My mother instilled in me a deep and abiding love for the culture and language of my birthplace. I still call myself a Filipino and I'll be one for the rest of my life. As such, I wasn't very moved by Presidential rhetoric about community and what "we" would do and what "our" future was. If anything, the barrage of faux sentimentality turned me off to identifying as an American.
Growing up here gave me more reasons to maintain that attitude. It was always a little entertaining checking the box for race on surveys or applications. Geographically, the Philippines is in Asia but has a strong Hispanic element in its culture. The vast majority of Filipinos are Catholic and many have Spanish surnames. That makes us not entirely Asian yet not entirely Hispanic either. But according to Uncle Sam, you're White, Black, Hispanic, or Asian. That was the first and most benign example I noticed of a government that categorized and de-personalized its people while lecturing them about how they were all part of a big, happy family. If you had any defining qualities, it wasn't for where you were from, what you believed, or what you did. It was if you were part of some interest group, like the middle class, working families, single mothers, and any kind of group that defined itself by relation to government support or privilege.
That was before Ron Paul. The good doctor removed the veil of doublespeak that hid the real America from me. And his supporters were real people with human faces, people who defined themselves by support for him and his principles and not by their membership in some government defined group. People who had interesting pasts and ideas, who were independent, and wanted to stay that way. People who were proud of where they came from in Oklahoma, New Hampshire, Utah, or wherever, and didn't want to run-off to New York or California. For the record, I live in NY and appreciate it not because it has "the greatest city in the world" but because it's where I grew up and my new home.
That's why I'll be happy, proud even, to call myself an American in Ron Paul's America. I'd stand before the world as an individual, free to make my identity as I see fit. My humanity wouldn't be distilled into a number or box to check. It would be the America I envisioned before coming here, one where a person could go anywhere and do anything as long as it didn't hurt anyone else. There'd be room for me in such a place, room for me to be myself. And that's what America's really all about.