July 4th

My friend Helene and I singing the Swedish frog song.
Photo by Rene Macioce. 

The camp where I work was founded by pacifists, people who had endured the horrors of Nazi Germany. Today our place of work is staffed by people from all over the world Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Poland, Czech Republic, Sweden... As a result, we don't celebrate Independence Day, we celebrate Diversity Day. In the evening the international staff and international campers share their cultures, their music and stories and tidbits of information that make their cultures different to the American one. But even Diversity Day makes me uncomfortable. I feel anxious around displays of nationalism. And so, I wrote and shared the following. 

Diversity Day. I don’t care where you come from. 

Allow me to explain. I am Australian. I am Spanish. I am descendent from Filipinos, Dutch, and Polish. I have blood relatives in Spain, Switzerland, England, America, Canada, the Philippines, and Australia. I speak un pocito Español. I grew up in Sydney, approximately 10,000 miles from this place. Where I come from we wear thongs instead of flip flops, the forest is called the bush. We eat lollies and not candy, and wear singlets instead of tank tops. We say it is hot outside, and not it is hot out. I call my friends on a mobile not a cell, We don’t walk upside down. Nor do our toilet bowls flush in the opposite direction... I don’t think. I never rode a kangaroo to school. I never owned a pet koala. I never met Steve Irwin. 

I’m rather uncomfortable with declarations of nationalistic pride. I grew up in a country whose national day of pride is Anzac Day, which commemorates the landing of Australian and New Zealander troops on the shores of Galipoli, Turkey, and were subsequently slaughtered in their thousands. Now we’re friends with the Turkish, and we eat their delicious foods and every year thousands more Australians congregate at Galipoli to remember the fallen from nearly a hundred years before. 

I’m a raging pacifist. I don’t get war. I really don’t. Once upon a time the British fought the Americans. Then they decided to stop. Now they are allies. Now they laugh at each other from across the pond. Seventy years ago my country was shooting Turks, and Germans, and Italians. Seventy years later I grew up eating pita bread, pretzels, and pizza. When my grandparents were teenagers they were sheltering from Japanese bombs and fearing death. My grandmother now drives a Japanese car, we all eat sushi, and my class at school almost had more Japanese students than Australian. 

I don’t get displays of nationalistic pride. They make me uncomfortable. I’ve spent the last five years traveling the world. I’ve been to Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Germany, France, Switzerland, England, Wales, and the US of A. Now I may have only begun to scrape the surface of the metaphorical travel iceberg but here’s what I’ve discovered in my travels. No one place is better or worse than any other. America is no more the land of the free than Australia is the land of sunshine. In all those places I’ve seen people going about their daily lives. They wake up, they eat food, they go to the toilet, they spend the day making ends meet, if they’re lucky they’ll have time to play. At the end of the day they gather with their families and then they go to sleep. There are variations on this theme. Yes, many people have less other people. Yes, you have the occasional people that spend their days plotting the demise of other people who aren’t their people. But you know what? Most people just happened upon this here crazy planet, and they’re doing the best that they can.

Diversity Day. I don’t care where you come from. I care that you treat me decently just because. I care that I can be open to cultures and traditions and foods and that aren’t my own. It may be naive. It may be simplistic. But we’ve got to start somewhere. I hope you’ll care less where I come from. At the end of the day, let’s just exist on this planet together. Let’s draw on several thousand years of human history and share the foods that our ancestors ate. Let’s find a way to share life, liberty, and the pursuit of happyness in all its rich diversity. 

The end.