{"id":509,"date":"2012-03-18T10:05:00","date_gmt":"2012-03-18T10:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/?p=509"},"modified":"2012-03-18T10:05:00","modified_gmt":"2012-03-18T10:05:00","slug":"to-be-an-american","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/?p=509","title":{"rendered":"To be an American"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just went to Ireland for spring break (I flew back on St. Paddy&#8217;s day)!  It was the most relaxingly enjoyable trip I&#8217;ve had in years.  If you want to read about it, see http:\/\/travelersnetwork.org\/luckybreak.  I had a pile of posts to write&#8211; about a zine of spirituality, psychology, and politics I want to start, and a rant about positive psychology&#8211; but this has been on my table longest:<\/p>\n<p>People often mistake me as being from another country, and I always blush.  Who wants to be from the great monster of imperialism, unhindered capitalism, waste, and environmental myopia?  There are a lot of reasons to not be proud of the actions of my country&#8211; its government and the collective effects of its people&#8211; but I&#8217;ve realized that there are core traits of American culture that are wonderful and I hold deeply.  Surely many come from privilege, but there they are.  Not all American&#8217;s live by these values, but they strike me as quintessentially American, and I am proud to share them.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>Work Ethic<\/b>.  If I could work all the time, it wouldn&#8217;t be enough.  I love working, accomplishing tasks, building something.  Whatever gifts I have, they come from this greatest one.<\/li>\n<li><b>Puritanism<\/b>.  The body and mind work best when neither coddled nor poisoned.  Give me water pure, beds simple, and a life without distraction.<\/li>\n<li><b>Forthrightness<\/b>.  Things should be said and done as directly and brutally honestly as the situation allows.  And if I err on crass bluntness, it&#8217;s a beautiful crassness that has its own virtue.<\/li>\n<li><b>Questioning Authority<\/b>.  What good is authority but to offer an thesis to build an antithesis for?  Authority seems like a straw-man to be undermined and humanized.<\/li>\n<li><b>Independence<\/b> of identity and thought.  I am my own person, and no matter where I go, I carry my independence with me and want for little else.  This allows me to be creative and think new thoughts without fear.<\/li>\n<li><b>Love of Liberty<\/b>, or self-determinism.  If independence is a psychological state, liberty is its corresponding locus of action.  I thrive on the potential to make any decision for my own affairs.<\/li>\n<li><b>Entrepreneurship<\/b>.  Wherever the questioning of authority bears fruit, it&#8217;s time to make fruit salad.  All good ideas deserve to be embodied in the world, through work and liberty.<\/li>\n<li><b>Mutt-ism<\/b>.  I am not a pure-bred anything, and this hybrid vigor gives me strength and contributes to my identity.  It is exactly my middle-class, cross-roads origins that give me potential.<\/li>\n<li><b>Love of Diversity<\/b>.  The surest source of both beauty and truth is the creativity that comes from mixing together differences.  Let all the peoples of the world jumble together and humanity will flourish.<\/li>\n<li><b>Save the World Complex: <\/b> This is probably more a Western thing than American, but I do think there&#8217;s a potential to save the world, and that we are well-situated to &#8220;do&#8221; it.  Doing it might not mean leading it, but it surely includes helping with ideas, building, and communication.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>These are only a small share of the values I hold, and without doubt community, sharing, love, travel, and play all are very important to me.  But for some reason, they don&#8217;t seem as American, and who would want to just be an American?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just went to Ireland for spring break (I flew back on St. Paddy&#8217;s day)! It was the most relaxingly enjoyable trip I&#8217;ve had in years. If you want to read about it, see http:\/\/travelersnetwork.org\/luckybreak. I had a pile of posts to write&#8211; about a zine of spirituality, psychology, and politics I want to start, &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/?p=509\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">To be an American<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}