Country Man / Woman / Person
I’ve longed held this image that the United States of America, if personified, is actually two people. One is a young, beautiful woman of Native American ancestry in bell bottoms and a red, white, and blue top, flashing a peace sign. The other is a typical white corporate alpha male, strong chinned, Mad Men styled hair, an American flag lapel pin, wielding a brief case.
How these two caricatures embedded themselves in my psyche, I don’t know. Perhaps there was a movie poster or posters somewhere along the way that inspired this image. Or maybe I saw some America advertisement or some other patriotic propaganda.
Whatever it was, that’s America to me. Not male or female, not brown or white, not peace and love, nor money and greed, but all of it. And somehow, this country needs both. It cannot thrive without both energies.
Our collective heritages are too intertwined, and our current State of the Union is far too hybridized to separate the symbiosis.
It’s like the other day, when I took my kids down to the beach. I noticed a bumper sticker on a truck that read: God Guns Guts Made America Free. Not too far from there, I saw a Pride flag flying on someone’s porch. Near there was an “I stand with Israel” flag, and not too far from there was a sign acknowledging the prior native lands that were once this now posh coastal enclave.
All of those things somehow fit because we’ve made it so. We’ve allowed what’s called co-existence and tolerance. It is perhaps, the one thing that remains of this American Experiment.
And I sure hope it remains. I hope it can always be AND instead of OR. Wouldn’t we all suffer if it were just one type of governance or civic philosophy took permanent hold? Wouldn’t the whole thing collapse if one side “won out” forever over the other?
It makes me think of the old MAD Magazine comic Spy vs. Spy, drawn by Antonio Prohías, where a spy all dressed in black and a spy all dressed in white regularly tried to thwart the other with pranks and dastardly deeds. One won, the other lost, one lost, the other won, and so on. The bottom line is that each one had their moment. Each side won, each side lost.
It’s called balance and I hope we can keep it. I hope we can all live and let live. That’s kind of the reason why I keep living here. As we head into the holiday that commemorates our independence, I hope that we can collectively be free and be whatever we want to be, while letting our fellow countryman/woman/person do the same.
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Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
