What It Means To Be An American

Chris Wallace ended the Fox News Sunday program today with a profile on the director of the Smithsonian. The report concluded with the ovservation that the director considers it his task to help visitors to the Smithsonian to understand what it means to be an American.

I find that definition provocative because the single most determinative factor defining an American is the choice, active or passive, to be an American. All other nationalities are defined almost exclusively by birth. Who were your parents? You are what they were.

My near ancestors (within the last 200 years) were immigrants - to America, to Tennessee, to Texas. Twenty-five years ago I realized that I could do my business (software development) from virtually anywhere on the planet. In the wake of that choice, I discovered that I was a Texan. Quite a surprise considering that I had always thought of myself as a citizen of the Galaxy.

I am pleased to be among those who have made a similar choice. I don't even mind that quite a few of them (most of them, actually) aprehend their citizenship differently. We have, after all, such a wide array of choices available to us. And the opportunity for choice never leaves us. Nowhere else on earth - even among those nations and populations most nearly like us - is the process of defining oneself so pervasive, so enduring. And so widely exercised.

No one has to be an American. It is not like being Jewish, or Arab, or Hispanic or Black, or Slav, or . . . anything else. We are a mongrel race made up of Jews and Arabs and Hispanics and Blacks and . . . anything else. While very few governments will let us abdicate our ethnicity, virtually any of them will allow any American to forswear his citizenship - even the US government. Chuck your American citizenship, and peoples all over the planet will fete you and sing your praises - while marveling at your stupidity for surrendering such a treasure.

I am a numbers guy - with a past association with the Show Me state. Follow the bodies. Who emigrates to Russia? Or to India? Or Japan? Or France? With the exception of Arabs (to whom the remainder of the planet must look like paradise) and of the kleptocratic class in Africa, immigration to Europe is a trickle compared to emigration to the US. An airline ticket to France costs a lot less than Mexicans pay to smugglers to get them across the porous US border, yet they take the more expensive route because the opportunity is so much greater here. Shoot, for what they pay to get here, they could take a luxury cruise to Europe and see all of the sights - but it's just so much harder to fit into a society that is suspicious of "outsiders."

I know that it is not easy getting here and re-establishing one's life. Most immigrants through our history have had to burn a generation to give the next one a leg up. I think about all of the pioneers who settled the American West, all the refugees who sweated their way across the Atlantic or the Pacific, through Ellis Island or on the railroad crews - the incredible hardships that they overcame to plant that second generation here. Risk takers, visionaries, survivors, inventors - that is the stock from which Americans are descended. And though the ratio of the hardiest immigrants to the now-native population is much lower than it used to be, it so far passes the ratios of other countries or continents as to make us a different kind of critter.

At the core of the definition of an American is that choice - the decision (active or passive) to be an American. Behind that choice is a level of competence that is wholly admirable. It is the competence and its progeny that define what it is to be an American. That's what I identify with - the drive to be better and to make the the world better. And there is no more fertile zone to nurture that drive and all of the good that flows from it than the US.


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