Living Abroad Taught Me to Love America

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/opinion/sunday/living-abroad-taught-me-to-love-america.html

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I ran away from America. In my late teens, I decided I didn’t want to be hemmed in by the place where I grew up. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision; through education, work, marriage, a child and a collection of foreign passports, I more or less made myself European, and for the next three decades I lived the expat life. But I was always, at heart, American — as a reporter working in war zones, when I spoke to refugees, when I traveled through broken post-conflict countries.

And so last year I returned home — just in time to see people here and abroad running away from America.

When I arrived in London on a crowded Air India flight nearly 30 years ago, Britain was in tumult. There were strikes and anti-American protests; Margaret Thatcher was unpopular, and Ronald Reagan was in power.

For the first time, I saw what America represented to the world: greed. My English cousins batted me down at dinner parties about America’s global bullying and mocked its “have a nice day” optimism. When I went to an interview for my first job — as a junior editor on a daily newspaper — the recruiter told me I did not have the proper skills.

“But I’m sure I can do it,” I protested.

“Of course you think you can,” she jeered. “You’re an American!”

I finally found work at a feminist newspaper in East London, where the editor in chief had grown up in awe of Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Angela Davis. “Only America could produce women like that,” she told me.

After 17 years in England, I moved to France, where I spent 13 more years raising my French son. France, too, was going through changes — economic malaise and a brain drain that sent talented young people fleeing abroad. Eventually, I left there as well, not because of France but because of the pull of America. I had achieved my youthful goal, only to find that, in the end, I wanted to be back home.

The United States I have returned to is vastly different from the one I left during the Reagan years. Then, the news came slowly, in small doses, and reading “Doonesbury” was a form of resistance. Today, the news comes too fast; my friends are thrust into a state of gloom with each new turn of the Trump administration.

And yet, despite the election cycle, despite the opioid crisis, despite the tax bill, despite yawning inequality, I still see good in this country.

For one thing, I’ve heard it all before; when it comes to confronting anti-Americanism, I’m a veteran. Anytime I work in Gaza or the West Bank, and must explain why the Trump administration is cutting funding to refugees. Every time I work with a Syrian refugee and must explain why we have a travel ban against Muslims. Over a decade ago, I climbed the stairs to my Baghdad hotel room thinking, how can I ever go home and live in a country that is so dedicated to occupation and regime change?

But there were other moments. I was walking down Rue de Rivoli in Paris on Sept. 11, 2001, when my phone rang. “Someone just flew a plane through the twin towers,” a friend told me. The pain and despair I felt in the following days was matched by the private and public sympathy I felt from thousands of Parisians.

When I served as the jury president for the prize for war reporting given in Bayeux, the first city to be liberated during the Battle of Normandy, the mayor showed me the expanse of American graves at the nearby military cemetery as a way of demonstrating what America meant to him, his family and his people.

As a liberal and human rights activist, I am cognizant of the dark times we live in. But I try to remember that generally, and where it counts, we usually do it right. The First Amendment. The New Deal. The Four Freedoms. The Marshall Plan. The opportunity and social mobility that is more possible than in any other country where I have lived.

Without getting into Norman Rockwell platitudes, I see a determined pragmatism, a freshness that comes from growing up in America that only someone who spent years away from it can notice. As the mother of a child in the French educational system, I was aware of how positive reinforcement and encouragement is frowned on in Europe. “Oh you Americans, always saying, ‘Good boy!’” one of my son’s teachers once told me. “We don’t believe in doing that.”

In France, only the very bright can enter programs to prepare them for the graduate schools that act as iron gateways to the elite. In America, we draw our political and economic leadership from everywhere. Yes, there are loans. But there are also chances.

I am deeply aware of our health care problems. I am aware of continued segregation, the racism, the efforts to restrict voting rights. But I still believe that at its core America both recognizes its flaws and struggles to overcome them. “America is great because she is good,” Alexis de Tocqueville is often quoted as saying. “If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

My friends don’t see it that way. They’re losing hope with each week. But I tell them it’s the best possible time to be in the resistance. Only during times of darkness can you see the stars, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said. The #MeToo movement came out of this darkness. Black Lives Matter came out of this darkness. The press is stronger and better than it has been in decades. There is a real focus on the most marginalized in society, more so than when I left in the 1980s.

I also think about my time working in places like Moscow, Turkey, Syria and Iran. I think about fellow journalists working in Saudi Arabia — our great ally — who are imprisoned and even threatened with execution simply for blogging. I’ve been followed, hacked and barred (from two of those places), but I am still able to write this and travel freely in the United States. So are the people whose views I find repellent.

We have a long way to go. We’ve been badly wounded by the 2017 inauguration, and we are still limping. But I know we can do it, because, having lived outside America for more than half my life, I still see the kind of stuff we Americans are made of.