The Most Exhausting Part About America Is The Pretending
Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash
Growing up as a white, middle-class person in the United States, I was taught many false things about my home country. The narrative told to me repeatedly was that America was the greatest country in the world, sometimes referred to as “American Exceptionalism.” Every politician praised us for being the best place on the planet, serving as a beacon of hope and democracy for everyone else.
President Reagan referred to America as a “shining city on a hill” — a statement he paraphrased from Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop, spoken nearly 360 years earlier. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called our system “the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced.” Many of our greatest political figures have presented a fawning image of American greatness.
This narrative is a false one. While America has many admirable ideals on paper, it’s not “great” for most of its inhabitants or to other members of the international community. It’s an active symbol of terror and oppression for many places around the world. We have started and orchestrated dozens of wars and have actively neglected large swaths of our own population. The ideals these men speak of were regrettably built on the blood and bones of the people they discarded.
This country hurts many people, yet we have to pretend that this reality isn’t true, lest we be labeled irrational extremists. A small, unending hurt caused by being awake in the United States is knowing how bad this country is and being forced to lie to almost everyone but yourself.
I cannot recall exactly when the myth of American Exceptionalism shattered for me. I don’t think there was a single ah-ha moment, but more like a slow, creeping realization. I grew up as a closeted trans kid (though initially, I thought I was just odd) with severe depression and anxiety. I had enough privilege not to get buried, but not enough to excel.
I spent my early years at a Catholic school, and the first major injustice in my life revolved around the priest there sexually molesting several of the students. It was a scandal, but a quiet one spoken about at a whisper. The girl who was rumored to be one of the victims ended up transferring to another school. The priest who committed the abuses was not removed from the church but instead transferred to a non-school district, where he remained until retirement decades later. His “indiscretion” was not revealed to the public-at-large until well after his death.
This event initially led to rage. An injustice had been committed, and we were supposed to pretend as if nothing had happened. I was so angry at the world, though I didn’t understand all the reasons why. I lashed out at the systems of power around me because I had enough privilege not to comply. Years later, in a hastily made decision, I ran in my middle school election under the platform of abolishing all detentions. The administration unsurprisingly squashed this effort. I was promptly removed from the ballot, and the person who promised an ice cream machine won instead (we never ended up getting it, Josh).
As a child, I naively thought that my experiences were unique. I believed that the world was supposed to be a just place but that I was somehow undeserving of that justice. I had seen so many stories of people triumphing over the bad of the world, and it was only when I grew into adulthood that I truly comprehended how banal these inequities were to American history. America was not a shining city on a hill — it was a walled palace sending volleys in every direction.
I learned about how this country was founded on the twin evils of genocide and slavery. I learned about all the wars and military interventions we started — hundreds in all — with over 80 covert interventions orchestrated in just about as many countries. I learned about the over 200,000 Filipino civilians killed during the Philippine-American War, the 2 million civilians killed during the Vietnam war, and the over 32,000 Afghanis we killed during the latest round of imperial expansion. Each time I thought I had reached the floor for my America, only to be shocked by a new low committed by our nation’s alleged heroes.
It was a privilege to learn about these things from afar. I surrounded myself in a shroud of masculine whiteness because I was terrified to be openly trans. I kept thinking if I would have made it over the line as a child if I had, or if I would have ended up like that girl transferred to another school district — buried and unbelieved. “Better to bury myself,” I thought. At least then I would have a choice.
I have seen so many people swallowed whole by our country and even more wither away from neglect. It’s one thing to bring up statistics about how so many Americans are starving and homeless, how hundreds of thousands cannot access proper medical care and clean water in some cases. It’s another to see it.
I have been to communities in America where people are starving on the street. A mother in a wheelchair asks me to buy diapers for her baby. She doesn’t care if I give her money. She wants the diapers for her child because it has not been changed in over a week.
I have been to communities in America where households do not have working sewage, let alone clean water. The smell is the first thing you notice before you even make it to the door of the house. It lingers in your car and on your clothes, and it takes days to scrub off.
I have been to communities in America where children have witnessed people being gunned down in the street. They do not speak about it with horror, but humor — the instance so ingrained in their lives that there is nothing left to do but laugh. The people in these communities certainly have greatness about them, but it is in spite of a country that has abandoned them.
This has never been a good country, let alone a great one, and yet we have to pretend like it is. We have to constantly listen to men like Joe Biden call this “the greatest, powerful, decent nation in the world.” We have to hear former President Obama wax poetically about how “if you had to choose any time in the course of human history to be alive, you’d choose this one. Right here in America, right now.”
Outside, shouting into the void that is the Internet, we are expected to listen to all of these platitudes, nod, and smile. It’s seen as common sense that this is a great country. When people lamented Donald Trump’s slogan, Make America Great Again, it seems many were not objecting to the delusional grandeur of that statement, but to the idea that America’s greatness was already behind it. They took no issue with the myth of exceptionalism that has rotted away at this country. “Don’t let anyone ever tell you that this country isn’t great,” Michelle Obama remarked in 2016, “That somehow we need to make it great again. Because this right now is the greatest country on Earth.”
When I hear speeches or headlines like this one (and there are many), I find myself transporting back to that younger me who wants to scream. What country has Michelle Obama been living in these past few years? Because it's not my America. In my America, which is to say reality, most Americans have little chance of upwards mobility. My America is a place of vast wealth inequality, racism, and institutionalized violence. I want to talk about those problems without having to comfort the collective delusions of petulant, rich men and women.
It's a tiring dance, and I know I am not alone here in this exhaustion. Most Americans are exhausted. The reasons they give for this exhaustion are varied — the pandemic, the news, increasing political polarization — but I believe it cuts far deeper than anyone one of these things. It has to do with how we organize ourselves as a people. Everything in this country is so dysfunctional, and yet we have to keep trekking along: paying our bills, going to work (if we are lucky enough to have it), and pushing ourselves and our kids through every day. Exceptionalism requires not only that you exaggerate your strengths but that you ignore your weaknesses — that we as a people ignore our problems.
Like myself, some people have had it with this way of thinking. There has been a string of content over the past few years questioning American Exceptionalism. The TV Show The Newsroom (2012–2014) infamously started its pilot with its main character Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), telling a room full of people that America wasn’t the greatest country in the world, and then listing how far behind it was by every conceivable metric. It was a shocking moment at the time, and since then, movies, articles, and books have sprung forward, expounding upon this point. There are now people such as Umair Haque who have made their careers producing content that heavily critiques the United States.
These critics, however, are not the majority opinion. Joe Biden would not have secured the presidency with a bid to return to normalcy if distrust in American Exceptionalism were the norm. When we look at polling data, a sizeable portion of the population believes in America's greatness. For example, in a USA TODAY/Suffolk Poll taken in 2020, 60% stated that America was the greatest or one of the greatest countries in the world.
This perception means that outside the most radical of circles, it's uncouth to criticize America. Most of the time, I suppress my opinions of this country because the people in my life live in the delusion of American Exceptionalism. They do not find it acceptable to call out the brokenness of America unless I caveat it as a limited problem, not a facet of America itself. Strangers on the Internet may read a curated version of that anger in a ten-minute article, but my justified rage is largely seen as counterproductive, irrational, and extreme to everyone outside a narrow few.
Day in and day out, everyone who sees America for the lie that it is has to largely swallow that anger — to pretend like everything is fine — and it’s exhausting. We hold our tongues at work and around our family members. We repeat to our acquaintances the talking points they feel comfortable hearing. We curate our online personas so as not to offend anyone within our chosen professions. Until all that is left is huddled conversations with close friends and screaming on the Internet.
It’s what I have done. Over and over again, I articulate my problems with this country because this is the only place I have to be discontented. I am so tired of having to pretend that this country is somehow better than it is. I write articles on the Internet when in actuality, all I want to do is cathartically scream at this insanity until my lungs give out.
I imagine this article may have ruffled one or two feathers. It was designed to do just that. There is so much hand-holding when it comes to American Exceptionalism, and it has done little good.
Yes, some things have improved over the years, but those gains have not been enjoyed universally, and they don’t excuse the preservation of this awful status quo. It is possible for some things to improve while other aspects of our society remain bad or even deteriorate. The moral arc of the universe does not require that things point in one direction for all things and with all people.
We have such a naive conception of progress. When leaders such as President Barack Obama tell young people that they will be “the ones who will decide whether or not America becomes the country that fully lives up to its creed,” I don’t think most listeners, including the speaker, truly comprehend what that work would entail. I think what people actually hear is that “things used to be bad, but they can and are getting better.” Rather than the truth, which is that things are bad for most people. They are getting worse, and to actually improve things, we will need to fundamentally change so much of America that it will be unrecognizable to us today, assuming it continues to exist at all.
That’s a lot to take in. I’ll wager that there will be one or two people raging against this article in the comments, informing me that everything I have stated is wrong. However, if that were true, you would not be here ranting to a powerless stranger on the Internet. Life would prove your point for you. Greatness does not have to lecture people on how great it is. You are here because the illusion of American progress has been briefly punctured, and you are screaming at the crack in the illusion rather than the illusion itself. You want to go back to thinking everything is fine when it is not.
To everyone else, I know this article was not the most optimistic one I have written. Statements of hope and progress are not inherently bad. We do need to find a future worth fighting for. It’s part of the reason I have a publication called After the Storm, devoted to telling stories about that very topic. Yet, right now, our current image of America is being used as a shield to block us from making that better tomorrow possible.
To truly build it, we need to be honest about both this country’s past and present so that we here and now (not just our children) can diagnose America’s problems accurately. We must be able to say that things are not fine and that they have never been fine. Until we take this step, we are just pretending that everything is okay for the sake of others’ comfort, and it’s exhausting.