Tuesday, December 28, 2010

It IS a Small World After All.

I had an interesting moment at my work today.

I work a 9-to-5 at a desk in an accounting department. The details of what I actually do are not really important and I don’t like to talk about them too much because I know my name has gotten googled more than once by some of the people my company works with.

Anywhoo, I share an office with a great guy who is about 55 and has a couple college-age kids and our office connects to my accounting department boss’s office. He’s probably about the same age.

Because of the industry we’re in, sometimes we have outside agents drop by to bring in paperwork/ask for money. Well one of those guys happened to drop by today and he was in talking to my accounting department boss (I also have an Operations boss, which is why I keep making that distinction) and I could hear snippets of their conversation over the Prince that was playing Pandora-style in my ears and I realized that I was the only native born American in this situation.

The guy I share an office with is from the Philippines originally, my accounting department boss is Irish and the outside sales guy is from West Africa.

It gave me a moment of pause and my frantic fingers grew less frantic on the keyboard and I just thought about it for a moment.

I am a big fan of this whole melting pot idea and while I come across as cynical and unimpressed all the time, I really am a sap for the whole idea of America. Not the idea that the founding fathers had (do you wanta live in a loose affiliation of agrarian states with a weak centralized government? ‘cause I sure as hell don’t) and not the idea that the Regan-ites had of America as a gleaming beacon of righteousness and not even the idea that John Winthrop had when he imagined a Puritan city upon a hill.

What I like is the idea that America is a place that was built by the people in it, the people that came here to be part of it. And yeah, one can say that America was stolen (which it was) from the native Americans who were here first, but you know what? I know about that whole land-bridge-from-Asia thing, you guys stumbled ass backward onto this continent just like the rest of us.

But am I straying from the point?
Yes, a bit.

The point is that I felt heartened by the fact that three quarters of us in that office at that moment today were from other places and here we all were going about our lives, trying to get through our day, working together (more or less).

So look, I know that this all is starting to sound a little we-are-the-world at the moment, but stick with me …

I like this place, I like this country that lets people in, that lets people adopt it as their own. I like this place. The guy I share an office with is good at his job, he is thoughtful and genuine and he is a good person (probably a better person than me) and his being in this country has made it better. And the same goes for the others in that little accounting department office today.

What a strange and amazing place this is that we have built, this odd country composed entirely of people from someplace else. And you know what? I have done less than those other guys in the office today. I once moved from the middle of California to the bottom of California. These other guys crossed oceans (literally, crossed oceans) to be in that office this afternoon, and they did it because there existed in them some kind of hope, some kind of faith, that this weird place called America maybe belonged to them too.

We have spent about 230 years telling the world what this country is and it turns out, we never really had to. This isn’t a nation that belongs to its history, at least not in the way that other nations do. This is a country that is constantly renewing its history, constantly writing and rewriting it. And I like that about this place.

And look, I live in a part of town where when I drive to work I drive past the guys waiting on the corner hoping to get picked up to mow somebody’s yard, and I grew up in a place that simply couldn’t function without an off-the-books labor-force of people willing to do excrutiating, backbreaking work (you try picking strawberries for a day) for too low pay. So maybe I’m a little more liberal than a lot of others, but I appreciate this country for what it did for me and what it continues to do for others.

I’m not so naïve that I’m ignoring our faults (of which we have very, very, very many) or our awful, nasty, filthy, unforgivable history (or which we have very, very, very much), but just for a moment today I had this interesting moment that made me love this place very much. And I am banking it. So that the next time I see that Arizona is trying to take away the citizenship of naturally born American citizens (children of illegal immigrants) or the next time I see the latent racism of those Obama-as-Hitler bumper stickers (there are a surprisingly large number in Southern California), I will just go to my happy place from this afternoon.

It was quite a happy place.

With all that said, I will now return to my default position: the nihilistic, hyper-ironic mockery of everything (but thanks for listening).

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