Growing up in this country, I've come to identify red white and blue with jingoism and shouting, a kind of brutish "get off my lawn" attitude. 'merica!
As someone who grew up in an occluded family, a neurospicy woman who never fit in, and someone who prizes curiosity and thoughtfulness above any mass belonging, I never got the 4th of July.
Barbecues, picnics, and hanging out with friends? Yes. Waving a flag? No.
But maybe this year feels a little different.
We moved this year, from a rural island the size of Manhattan with 12,000 residents, to West Seattle. We lived on the island for 15 years. It was easy to live there — nothing was that hard.
Moving my family back to the city where I once lived? It has changed us for the better. And that's true even though this has been one of the hardest 4 months of my life.
In a dark time, the eye begins to see, to quote Roethke.
When you live somewhere safe, somewhere beautiful, somewhere where most people live down long driveways in a home surrounded by trees, America can feel like a concept. The place out there, far away. An idea, even.
It's easy to feel like your seclusion is the best way to live.
But in these past 4 months, I've had daily encounters with incredible people who have helped our family through our kiddo's mental health crisis. We've been surrounded by people, everywhere we go. We spend time every day at Alki Beach, where music thunders up the road from loud cars, where families throng, where people of every race and class gather to see the vast expanse of water and mountains.
And this is America too. The loud, the crowded, the jubilant voices of children getting ice cream, the young men with pants hanging low leaning into the window of the car of someone they know. The family that owns the birria taco restaurant with fire-red tortillas. The older man without a shirt on having a picnic by himself and feeding the birds. The kids skipping rocks off the stairs into the water. The teenage girls dressed up for the holiday with a hairstyle they saw on TikTok.
I feel jubilation in the amount of people I get to see every day in this city, the panoply of human experience from trips to dozens of different neighborhoods in Seattle for appointments and doctors' visits, trips to potential schools for next year, and following what smells good to a little mom and pop restaurant where the food fills my belly with joy.
My mind feels better here than it did when we lived down a long dirt road.
All this to say — I don't know. I don't have many answers.But I do believe that when we seclude ourselves away from people who don't look like us, or talk like us, or think like us, we miss the chance to experience in our bodies what it means to be an American.It's always going to be chaotic and filled with contradiction to live in this country.
To riff on Walt Whitman: we are large; we contain multitudes.
That might be what makes this country. We are large. We contain multitudes.
To quote Heather Cox Richardson from her brilliant Substack, Letters from an American, here is the contradiction at the heart of this place:
“For all the fact that the congressmen got around the sticky little problem of Black and Indigenous enslavement by defining “men” as “white men,” and for all that it never crossed their minds that women might also have rights, the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators on the edges of a continent declared that no man was born better than any other.
America was founded on the radical idea that all men are created equal.”
The ideal has not yet met the reality for everyone.
But the vision is still there. And that’s what we can contribute — the work that allows this vision to become reality for everyone here.
And this is where I must share the only writing that makes sense to me on the 4th of July: Langston Hughes' poem, “Let America Be America Again.”
“Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!”
Thank you for reading.
I don’t have a recipe for you today. My guess is that you already know what you’re cooking today. You might not even read this today. But I wanted to share this piece I wrote on Threads this morning. I’m coming to love that space, where I can write and think and not worry about algorithms or making a reel. Come on over there, if you want more of my writing. And community.
p.s. If you are ever in West Seattle, do go to Fire Tacos and Cantina. Those tacos make me so happy. A big family runs the restaurant and the space is thriving. Have a picnic with birria tacos on a picnic table in front of the water. If you’re planning on coming here, let me know. Maybe I can join you.
Thank you, Shauna. I've always loved that poem. And you've articulated so well why I will always want to live in a densely populated, diverse area of the country. I like that my friends and neighbors are of so many different races and ethnicities and religions. We don't agree on everything, but we agree that the grand American experiment is worthwhile and that things are better when we can coexist and move forward as a community. If that's not patriotism, I don't know what is.
Thank you for posting your thoughts and this amazing poem.