So I wrote this rant last night on FB, and I thought I would share it here, along with a question, which I will pose after the rant:
What if we stopped letting others define us by arbitrary things? I was born in the US, but I hate its culture. I think the entire concept of borders and nations and patriotism to be asinine and arbitrary, a make believe that enough people buy into to make it "real." The border of a country doesn't mean anything more profound than the border of a state or of a city. Natural borders exist - a coastline, a mountain range, a river. But imaginary lines drawn up by white, moneyed, powerful men in the early 20th century aren't any more real than their belief in female hysteria or The White Man's Burden. Why do we still give them credence? I have far more in common with poor people, with Pagan people, with animists and environmentalists, with queers and artists and freaks, anarchists and activists, than any assembly of people who happen to live in my vicinity but may be wealthy, conservative, Christian, consumerist straight folk. Those people are not my tribe, even if they live down the block, while people who are my tribe may live thousands of miles away in any direction. But I'm supposed to hold solidarity with the MAGA twatwaffle who wants to destroy my Earth for money and apocalypse, deny me rights, and use The Handmaid's Tale as an instruction manual, because ...I can walk to his house? What do borders mean in a world where values and beliefs and even truths are not agreed upon locally because we're not all meeting in the town square and reading the same news and hearing the same pastor pontificate on Sundays? What do they mean when our foods are imported from all over the world even when there's a farm that produces the exact same thing 30 miles away? What do they mean when our clothes all come from the same sweatshops and our music from the same producers and our books from the same publishers, translated into 30 languages? What do they mean when our jetlag includes lamenting about different international release dates for movies and TV shows? What do they mean when a French TV channel makes a show in English (Versailles) about a French king to "gain a wider audience" because monolingual Americans can't be bothered to read subtitles and that makes a difference in FRANCE? It's the most arbitrary shit! I am defined by who I am and what I believe, not where my mama was when she pushed me out of her vagina. Fuck borders, and fuck nationalism, and fuck "American exceptionalism," and fuck taking pride in shit you didn't do, whether that's a nation or a sports team, none of whom are generally from where they play sports anyway. Why do people take pride in, for example, the Broncos, whilst bitching about non-native Denverites? How many Broncos were born in Colorado? I'mma guess not many. IT MEANS NOTHING. Place meant something when your ancestors had lived there for centuries or millennia; place meant something when your great, great grandfather built the farmhouse you live in and you only had to walk to the graveyard to pay homage to generations of your ancestors. Place meant something when your tribe lived there with you. But it doesn't now, for most of us. So why do we give a rat's ass what some dudes in suits a hundred years ago decided would be advantageous for their land grab?
image from blogspot
So my question is: how many of you have a sense of "place"? I doubt many Americans do - even if you are First Nations, the odds are pretty good the government stole your sacred places from you - but thought maybe in other parts of the world, it still exists, where it wasn't destroyed by enclosure or industrial revolution, though I still think it's probably more rare than not. And if you have it, is it due to your ancestors' rank? Like, do you still live in the ancestral home because your predecessors were wealthy landowners, and didn't need to go to the city looking for work/didn't lose their land in enclosure/weren't starved out by famine or driven out by war? I'm curious if anyone has it, what it feels like, and if you feel a greater tie to the idea of your "nation" (which also may be dependent on how old your nation is)?
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