Homesick: Coming Home to America Isn't What it Used to Be

I first became an expatriate when I served an overseas tour in the Army. At the conclusion of my tour I joined a 747 full of soldiers bound for home. When the plane touched down in New York, as the tires skidded on the runway, the passengers broke into spontaneous applause.

Veterans of overseas flights, especially in the late twentieth century, will fondly remember when passengers routinely applauded the landing, as though the pilot were repeating Lindbergh’s feat. What we were really doing was acknowledging the flight crew’s competence as well as the technical achievements of every aviation pioneer from the Wright Brothers on.

But there was something different about the applause generated by a cabin full of American soldiers returning home after years of absence.

Half of my family is European. They think European, vote European, bitch European. Which means they have a critical perspective on the U.S., a perspective I’ve come to share. But even when talking to such Europeans, there was no mistaking the awe.

Yes, awe. Those who would trash my country’s founding principles in their rush to trash its foreign policies were in awe of what I’d had the privilege to grow up with, what I’d had the privilege to feel homesick about, what my blue passport declared to everyone standing in line with me at the boarding gate.

When the wheels touched the runway, when the returning soldiers felt the shudder of the vehicle bringing them home, knowing what lay beneath the wheels, what inviolable principles governed the soil (no matter who governed over it), they felt something I struggle to describe.

There’s a kind of buzz or hum every American experiences when standing on American ground. You don’t notice it until you leave the country, and you don’t fully connect with it unless you stay away a long time. When you return, it penetrates you like a mother’s voice soothes a child in her womb.

I returned to America after a two year absence to the music of wheels screeching on the runway, the cabin vibrating and rattling, my fellow passengers clapping, many with arms raised over their heads. Some stomping their feet in the aisles. My cheeks wet. Vowing I’d never take my country for granted again.

I learned, then, a new definition of the word “home.” It consists, in fact, of everything you take for granted.

But something has since changed. For the first time in history, Americans have reason to be embarrassed about being American. For the first time in history, the American president is a person with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

None. What. So. Ever.

I don’t get on that plane anymore. If I did I wouldn’t clap upon landing, I wouldn’t stomp my feet, and I sure as hell wouldn’t shed tears of happiness. And it isn’t really about one despicable person, even the one at the top. It’s about the 77 million people who voted for him.

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This Post is republished on Medium.

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