If I've learned one thing on my trip around the United States, talking to LGBTQ youth about coming out and suicide and depression for The Trevor Project, it's the fact that the concept of unity in this country is an impossibility.
How do we unite:
- The 18-year-old gender fluid person of color in Arkansas who has three current partners but really considers themselves only sexually attracted to themselves
So many others. Men, women, trans. Every possible race and national origin imaginable. Gay, straight, bi, intersex, asexual, pansexual, and probably fifty other classifications changing daily.
Those who live for football, and theater, and guns, and gardening, and video games, and cheese fries, and God, and books, and wine, and opera, and politics, and pets, and yoga, and kids, and grandkids, and so much more.
I do believe the word "united" is probably the wrong word for what these states are. United in what?
I think it's easy and popular for many of us on one side or the other of the political fence to fret about how things are getting worse, and how we're falling away from unity, but I think that's actually untrue.
I think it's always been this way. We are a society of so many stories, all of them valid, as much as we might like to validate only the ones that jibe with our own experience.
This is not an issue reserved for the political right. I'm guilty, too. I would assume most of us have been, at some point in our lives. We rail against those whose ideas about the world negate our own experience. And that's natural. It's abhorrent when others negate our experience. To be an activist, one must rail against those who negate our place in the world. Without activists, change will never happen. Even for those who are not activists, it's natural. We only know what we know.
Someone recently called me an activist, and it made me think: Am I one? I do want to be part of the progress, and I work for change. And yet this trip has also showed me the limits of that activism. Which should make me sad, but instead makes me feel -- comfortable?
Weird, huh?
I just think it's all going to be okay.
I've been thinking a lot about the word "patriot" recently. I have a visceral reaction to the word, as it is often co-opted by those who would like to harken back to a make-believe time when people like me -- I mean gay, Jewish, complicated -- weren't "here."
I've been pondering patriotism, because clearly it's a misnomer. A person who wishes to not include the experiences of a wide swath of our population is no patriot. That so-called "patriotism" is a love of revisionist history, and it misses, I think, the true American experience I tried to paint above.
To truly be a patriot, in my mind, is to do something that's incredibly difficult.
To be a patriot, one must love the entire American experience. All of it. The fact that we seem to be a country on the brink of combustion, and we have been that way for so long, yet we never seem to explode. Yet, anyway. To be a true patriot, we must love the clashes of culture, race, national origin, sexual orientation, class, politics, ideology, and religion. We must relish the fact that this country will never be united, because these clashes are in many cases unsolvable. We must accept the fact that hatred and distrust and bone-crushing heartbreak and soul-sucking unfairness and hurt feelings and devastation have always been and will always be part of this experience. I think the key may be to embrace the chaos.
And I think to be a true patriot, one must accept that one's place is in this mess, and not above it, because there is no above it. I've always thought I was above it, but my trip gave me enough opportunity to feel the hatred and disgust and disappointment that tells me I belong here. We're all humans and we're all full of shit.
I came on this trip feeling optimistic about finding an America that could be healed, but what I've found is a society so steadfast in the utterly diverse exploration of personal freedom of thought and expression that maybe we don't need to be healed Or united, anyway. It's a tapestry of deeply explored and unexplored lives. How do you merge that?
You don't. You just live it and love it.