Explaining America

It’s an odd experience to be living in another country when your home country is acting up.  People want you to explain the inexplicable to them.  Like why shooting sprees are so common in the US, for example.  Yesterday, I met up with a Norwegian family in the park—their son Peter is Milo’s best friend, and they had invited Milo over to play.  Erik, the father, said he had read about the Giffords tragedy.  “Why does America have so many of these kinds of incidents?” he asked me.

A month or so ago, we had a local family over for Sunday lunch.  As the afternoon progressed and they became more comfortable, the conversation moved, as it often does, to politics.  Iu, a Catalan, was completely stymied by the debate over health care reform.  “Here,” he said, “it isn’t a matter of politics.  We just believe that everyone should be able to get medical care if they are sick. Can you explain it to me?”  We could not.  Spain, like the US, suffers from xenophobia, but even those who are resentful of the presence of immigrants have a different concept of basic human rights than do many of my countrymen.

And then there are the conversations about race, and religion.  Even though I do my best to read widely and understand the many sides of the issues facing the US and the world, the truth is that living in the precious bubble that is Park Slope, Brooklyn—doing my shift at the Park Slope Food Coop, working at one of the country’s more progessive universities, and belonging to the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture—means that I have had a more narrow, day in day out perspective than I’d like to admit.

Living in Barcelona this year has, at times, made me feel prouder of my country than I normally feel when I am in the US, lucky to have been born there.  Really, what it means that I was lucky to have been born to parents who could provide for me, encourage me to get educated and help pay for it.  To be born poor in the US is no picnic.  But this week, after Tucson, after reading about Palin’s crosshairs ads and the exhausting but totally predictable across-the-aisle finger-pointing, I mostly feel sad.