As a Peace Corps Volunteer, we are expected to leave our lives in America for two years so that we can help others in other countries. For the most part, we are by ourselves, thrown headfirst into an alien culture, where we basically sink or swim. However, sometimes, my fellow volunteers and I are able to meet in groups at some points in time.
Some volunteers and I met up in a small mountain village in Morocco for a Fourth of July party. While on the rooftop of our host’s mud house, I watched the village children playing through the trash pit and the young men walking up the one paved road of the village. The smell of the basil covered meat and barbeque chicken mixed with the smell of fresh mountain air and trash. It had been a while since a large group of volunteers had gotten together, and I looked around and said to another volunteer that I could not believe that we were actually in another country. We were half a world away from our American friends and our families, and at this point, we were still not certain what lessons we would teach to the Moroccans.
I am not sure who started it, but as the sun began to set behind the mountains, and the evening star almost became clearly visible, we began to sing The Star Spangled Banner. Nobody had planned for it, and yet nobody was surprised by it. Smiles appeared on our faces as we reached the crescendo, and though most of my friends will admit that I am not an outwardly patriotic person, I found it difficult to not get choked up with emotion as I reached the last line of the song o’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave. As we finished, we heard the call to prayer begin. Our host turned to us and said that they actually held off the call to prayer until we finished.
I am liberal. I believe that private businesses need to be held accountable for their actions against the public environment. I believe that health care is a right, not a business. I believe in marriage equality. I believe that there are problems in America that we, as Americans, can and should improve. But I am patriotic, and I love my country. I love that if I want to, I can move from Pensacola, FL to San Francisco, CA in order to follow my dreams. Living here in Morocco, I cannot find that belief in Moroccans – their dreams consist of creating a family and staying in their village to continue to help with the harvest. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but the concept of having an identity separate from your family seems foreign to many people. Though they often pity me for being here in Morocco without family, I try hard not to feel bad when I see a girl in the fields and know that her entire life will consist of only that.
Before I left for the Peace Corps in Morocco, one of the common phrases that I would hear politicians repeat was about the concept of “Real America”, the Americans who love their country and who want it to succeed; the Americans who believe that America is a divinely inspired country that needs to follow a specific philosophy in order to remain divinely inspired. When I see those politicians and the crowds surrounding them, I cannot help but to notice the subtext of the speech screaming for a return to the power of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and the implication being that if you weren’t one of those things, you were not “us”, but “them”, something that needed not only to be shunned, but destroyed. The rabidity to which people will scream “I want my country back!” is much more frightening to me than the thought of the call to prayer coming from a mosque near Ground Zero.
As a liberal, I have always loved the idea of different cultures and peoples mixing together in this country. Sure, it forces more arguments, but that is because we are mixing completely different worldviews. Sure, when “white culture” mixes with Hispanic culture, we see a new mixed culture begin to emerge. As a liberal, I love rather than fear it. When I tell this to conservatives, they always ask me how I can love my country if I have no problem with seeing the culture of my country change to something completely different. I respond with the fact that the change is our culture. America’s culture is always changing and is always different – the fact of that constant change is itself the American culture.According to a recent ARIS study, Islam and other faiths in America are increasing their percentages of the American population, while those who call themselves Christians in America are decreasing in percentage. Some argue that this represents a destruction of American culture, but this is no more true than the increase of other races and decrease of whites represents a destruction of American culture.
The American culture is based not on religion nor race but on ideals – the ideal that all men are created equal, that all men have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the ideal of liberty and justice for all. I love America not because of the color of its citizens’ skin nor to what god they pray to, but because of the ideals that all Americans swear to uphold. And if you want to know a part of American culture that will never change, it is that.
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