American Me

Yes­ter­day morn­ing, I entered a room filled with for­eign­ers. By the time I left, there were 240 new Amer­i­can cit­i­zens, myself included.

My jour­ney to this moment is one that, in ret­ro­spect, would pretty much a given. Since 1992, I’ve been involved on the outer periph­ery of pres­i­den­tial elec­tions. In the mid-1990s, for a brief period, I was even lucky enough to be present when poli­cies and legal prece­dents that con­tinue to shape the Inter­net were established.

In the last pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, I took a week off from work to put my money where my mouth was, vol­un­teer­ing with the A.C.L.U. to help pro­tect indi­vid­ual cit­i­zens’ right to free assem­bly and free speech dur­ing the New York Repub­li­can con­ven­tion. I’ve had many mem­o­ries from that week but what stuck most, in my mind, was the coura­geous group of three Repub­li­cans who, one night dur­ing that week, went down to Union Square, where most peo­ple were protest­ing against the GOP, and set up indi­vid­ual spot ask­ing the pro­test­ers to debate them. The exchanges were both fiercely par­ti­san and cor­dial and I am still amazed by the fact that peo­ple who sat on oppo­site extremes of the polit­i­cal spec­trum could not only sit down and talk with each other but do so in a man­ner that may have helped all participants.

And yet the time passed and it took me another few years to even apply for Amer­i­can cit­i­zen­ship. But last year, I finally decided to make the leap. And the leap was made on one small but cru­cial and all to often taken for granted right: the right to vote.

I have not posted any par­ti­san thoughts on this site when it comes to Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. It was a con­scious deci­sion: back then I was a res­i­dent alien (yes, that’s the tech­ni­cal term) and I felt that to use this bully pul­pit to dis­cuss Amer­i­can pol­i­tics would be in bad taste. As a non-citizen, I felt that I had lit­tle or no right to really voice my opin­ion as loudly because I con­sid­ered it to be in bad taste.

But things started bug­ging me. It’s not that I was start­ing to dis­like Amer­ica but rather that I started to dis­like how the admin­is­tra­tion was dis­man­tling the idea of Amer­ica that has been set down by the found­ing fathers. Peo­ple who know me well know that I can be a bit obses­sive about the US con­sti­tu­tion and the bill of right. And what I felt, after a few more years of the Bush era, was that this admin­is­tra­tion was going against a sub­stan­tial amount of what the found­ing fathers intended.

A worse crime than attack­ing the foun­da­tion of the Amer­i­can repub­lic though, was in the way it was done, attempt­ing through twisted logic, to paint that attack as in line with what the found­ing fathers intended. To besmirch their names in such a way was, I think one of the final straw.

The peo­ple who assem­bled in Philadel­phia in 1776 and declared that enough was enough put their necks on the line for us with the dec­la­ra­tion of inde­pen­dence. And the peo­ple who, 11 years later, came up with the US con­sti­tu­tion did the improb­a­ble: they decided that, hav­ing defeated the might­i­est army of the time, they would not accu­mu­late and aggre­gate the power amongst them­selves but rather, they would form a coun­try where checks and bal­ances would rule the day to ensure that the peo­ple had the strongest voice possible.

So the states would act as a check on fed­eral pow­ers; 3 branches of gov­ern­ment would bal­ance each other out to ensure that none became too strong; even those would be bal­anced as inter­nal mech­a­nisms would limit the author­ity of any sin­gle per­son within that branch.

George Wash­ing­ton, who had ini­tially had a hard time pros­e­cut­ing the war but even­tu­ally turned things around to win a coun­try was given a chance at becom­ing the country’s new king. But not only did he turn down that oppor­tu­nity, he did not seem to argue for a strong exec­u­tive branch. Once in power, he not only avoided the trap­pings of roy­alty, but also set for­eign pol­icy prece­dents by declar­ing the US as a neu­tral nation in for­eign con­flicts, and eschewed any attempts at war, pre­fer­ring peace.

Alexan­der Hamil­ton believed that the country’s bur­den ought to be shared by all. How­ever, while head­ing the house of rep­re­sen­ta­tive, he decided to sway votes to ensure that his polit­i­cal oppo­nent (and a fierce advo­cate against that idea), Thomas Jef­fer­son, could become pres­i­dent because he felt that doing oth­er­wise would under­mine the legit­i­macy of the country.

Thomas Jef­fer­son, a slave owner, decided to deride the prac­tice of slav­ery in his ini­tial draft of the dec­la­ra­tion of inde­pen­dence and time and time again, pushed for laws that ended up dis­man­tling some of his own interests.

The men intended on build­ing a new coun­try based on equal­ity and jus­tice for all, even if that meant that they would no longer be guar­an­teed wor­ship but instead would be con­sid­ered equals to all. And for this, I would say that they were not just mere men, they were supermen.

But some­where, some­how, things started going hor­ri­bly wrong in our times. And I sus­pect that the main issue has been one based on eco­nom­ics, with many peo­ple believ­ing that the golden rule (“he who’s got the gold makes the rule”) should be the basis for our nation. That golden rule led to a belief that each Amer­i­can is an indi­vid­ual and, as such, has lit­tle or no respon­si­bil­ity to the rest of soci­ety. It ele­vated the indi­vid­ual to a place where kings would be OK, and thus, the belief of a strong pres­i­dent, stronger than con­gress or the courts, started to take hold.

And so, a new era of self­ish­ness replaced the basis of self­less­ness that our found­ing fathers intended.

I could recount the ways in which those things can be illus­trated by the actions of this admin­is­tra­tion. Whether it is a rush to war (and here, I do not talk about Afghanistan, a war that was based on facts and a real enemy but rather about Iraq, a war that was “sold” because it appealed to a cer­tain group) or the belief that cor­po­ra­tions can be above the law (for exam­ple, the tele­com pros­e­cu­tion exemp­tions cur­rently being dis­cussed which, I’m sure, are leav­ing every crim­i­nal try­ing to fig­ure out how they can present their trade in a way that will make them ben­e­fit from the same approach large tel­cos do), some­thing went amiss.

But things going amiss are not the rea­son to become cit­i­zen of a coun­try like the United States, a coun­try that was founded on opti­mism, hope, and renewal.

And hope, renewal and opti­mism seems to be the fla­vor of our times. While we are still liv­ing in dark ages, there is a sense that a new breed of pol­i­tics, a new breath of fresh air, may be allowed its place at the pub­lic table. In fact, I would even be so bold as to say that wild con­cepts like sub­stance over style could have a chance to enter this elec­tion cycle.

Granted, Obama oozes style, with the type of deliv­ery that not only presents new ideas but voices them in a way that peo­ple find it inspir­ing. Granted, McCain offers sub­stan­tive pol­icy but I am not wild about that sus­tance, as it pro­vides a view of an Amer­ica angry at the world, and fear­ful of others.

And that, ulti­mately, is what this pre­cious vot­ing right comes down to. By now, hav­ing lost half of the peo­ple who gen­er­ally read my site (an assump­tion I’m mak­ing because I sus­pect that the pre­vi­ous few para­graphs will leave many of my Repub­li­can lead­ers angry), I can say that a lot of my think­ing about get­ting US cit­i­zen­ship revolved around the right to vote and the right to belong. The USA, only 7 years ago, was a coun­try that, for the most part, wel­comed non-Americans. But since 9/11, things have changed and there seems to be a grow­ing resent­ment of for­eign­ers, largely dic­tated through pol­icy pro­nounce­ments that would make the found­ing fathers spin in their graves.

So I am now a new cit­i­zen and, on elec­tion day, I will most prob­a­bly go out and vote FOR Barack Obama. Vot­ing FOR some­one is an oppor­tu­nity I missed in the 2000 elec­tion cycle (I have to admit that, had I been a cit­i­zen in 2004, I would have been more intent to vote AGAINST George Bush than FOR John Kerry).

But of course, there is a lot of work to do between now and then, and there is more than one elec­tion to go. This coun­try, my coun­try, is in trou­ble and I, like many oth­ers, have worked to do. And I hope that one or more peo­ple, hav­ing read this, will con­sider recon­nect­ing with their civic duty.

But do not take this for my telling you who to vote for. Whether you believe in John McCain or Barack Obama only mat­ters to me inas­much as I might have to work with or against you polit­i­cally. How­ever, what would really touch me more than any­thing is if you, reader in any coun­try where lead­ers are cho­sen by elec­tion, could recon­nect with your com­mu­nity and help improve it by restor­ing real polit­i­cal dia­logue, just like those repub­li­cans, with whom I respect­fully dis­agreed on a warm night in August 2004, who decided to talk to their non-republican coun­ter­parts. On that night, all those involved may have come from dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal fac­tions but they talked in the lan­guage of exchange of ideas that so many decades ago inspired the world and defined one coun­try, my coun­try, the United States of America.