On Becoming An American
Ravi Venkateswaran
Author's Note: I was naturalized in Philadelphia during the 4th of July week celebrations. They asked me to deliver an address on behalf of everyone being naturalized with me. Several people in the audience suggested I send the text of the address to the NPR Democracy Forum, where it first appeared. For what it's worth, here it is:
Response Speech on Behalf of New Citizens
Naturalization Ceremony
Philadelphia, 7 July 1995
libertynet.org
Excerpt:
....There is no other nation [the USA] that I could countenance committing myself to as I am to this one. This is neither arrogance nor fastidiousness. This is a country built by people from everywhere else, people who have found a common purpose and forged a common history. I could never, for instance, see myself truly becoming an Englishman, a Frenchman, or a Swede. Countries such as these would always have me feel like an outsider on the inside, where it counts most. But here in America we are a new tribe, one defined by a common vision, not by DNA or long servitude to a particular dynasty of monarchs. That is the key to understanding the phenomenon of America.
I have a Serbian colleague in Denmark who has lived there all her life. On hearing of my naturalization, Danijela asked me how it felt, and told me she never thought of herself as Danish, only Serbian. Turks in Germany, Greeks in Britain, Koreans in Japan, Tibetans in India, all have expressed similar views to me.
The following story illustrates the difference that makes all the difference. Last year I was in a restaurant in London, a successful institution that serves nouvelle Continental cuisine, operated by an older Indian who was obviously a long-time resident. When a diner at the next table asked him where he was from and how long he was in the business, he replied in impeccably modulated Oxford English that he was Indian, and had been in business in London for the last forty years. Last month in New York I heard a young Indian, a recent immigrant by all indications, declare with a characteristic movement of his head, "I was born in Bombay only, but I am being American now!" That is the key to understanding the phenomenon of America.
The very diversity of America makes for the possibility of the kernel of a process of peace, nurtured here, between strife-riven peoples elsewhere in the world. Where else do Arabs and Israelis, Indians and Pakistanis, Armenians and Turks, Serbs and Bosnians, get a chance to really know each other? The first person I ever met from the former East Pakistan is now one of my dearest friends. The Serbian who worked on my house has a Moslem assistant. My Israeli colleague in school was inseparable from his Syrian friend. The Turk who drove my taxi last week was working for a Greek. It reminds me of a short story by O.Henry where the last surviving member of one feuding Tennessee family sets out to shoot the last surviving member of the other, now living in New York City.
The first guy (let's call him McCoy) arrives at Grand Central after a long journey, clutching a piece of paper with the address of his sworn enemy (let's call him Hatfield) in one hand and a six-gun in the other. After much disorientation by the din and bustle of the city, the pace of its life, and the treatment meted out to a disoriented hillbilly by the average denizen of that metropolis, McCoy arrives at Hatfield's door and sees him step outside, an easy target, not even armed. "Cousin Hatfield! Cousin Hatfield!" he shouts, tears of joy running down his face as he hugs his surprised intended victim, glad to have found a friend...
My own story is that of the accidental immigrant. My father was a diplomat, and I grew up with the privilege of traveling the world. English has always been my first language, as it was with him, and with my mother, and with my grandparents, although we spoke our mother tongue with fluency and other languages besides. I grew up more familiar with the literature of Salinger and Flannery O'Connor, of Poe and Mickey Spillane than the average American child. It has therefore been much easier for me than for most immigrants to adjust. My story is not one of fleeing an oppressor, arriving with the clothes on my back, coping with adversity, learning the language, and learning to survive. To those here whose stories more closely resemble that, and to the millions before and hence whose stories indeed do, I salute you. That is the key to understanding the phenomenon of America.
I came here to go to graduate school, not as an immigrant. One year stretched into several, until I came to realize that this was where I did belong. My father, Mark Twain, and people like Pat Robertson, in that order, each have something to do with my being here today. My father was an intellectual deeply involved in government. He was influenced by the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi, of Thoreau and de Tocqueville, and was passionate about individual liberty and the never-ending fight against tyranny. He saw first hand the effect of the Second World War and the Holocaust. I remember his giving me Ann Frank's diary to read when I was the age she was when she wrote it, and taking me to see the closet where she hid from the Nazis. He was passionate about how precious and fragile were the rights most take for granted and he deeply influenced my view of the primacy of individual liberty.
Mark Twain was an American in the truest sense of the word. He was a man far ahead of his time. I was much influenced by his other than mainstream works, in particular 'A Connecticut Yankee' (an indictment of monarchy), 'Pudd'nhead Wilson' (an indictment of slavery and prejudice), and collections of essays like the Brick Moon which proclaim and celebrate the rights of women. This is starkly relevant today when small but very vocal and influential groups are seeking in the face of apathetic public reaction to abridge and abrogate those rights, to demonize the disenfranchised in a time when the gap between rich and poor is wider here than in any other industrialized society, and to promote intolerance and prejudice in the name of a better society. These people are the Pharisees of the day, closed-minded, fearful, hateful, insecure, bent on enforcing their exclusive truth on everyone else in a manner more reminiscent of George Orwell's Big Brother than the New Testament's Jesus Christ, whose attitude to social problems if reflected in a contemporary would be dismissed by the likes of Limbaugh as dangerously and laughably liberal.
This is how I came to the dawning realization that I was not going home, because I was home. Because my ideals were this country's ideals. Because I felt passionately about its well-being and its fate. And because I wanted to participate fully, and make my contribution more tangible.
This is now your responsibility as well. Freedom is fragile. Freedom can be taken away much more easily than tyranny can be overthrown, and with much greater subtlety. Freedom must be nurtured continuously. We cannot take freedom for granted. The extreme right is no different from the extreme left in that neither is a respecter of freedom and individual liberty. Stalin and Hitler were two sides of the same coin. Freedom is sustained by questioning and debate. Freedom is extinguished with the suppression of questioning and debate. Even something as seemingly innocuous as the Senate's attempt to censor traffic on the Internet has enormous ramifications for personal freedom. It has been less than two decades that communist and fascist governments alike were registering people's typewriters to trace typewritten copies of 'subversive' books like Orwell's 1984, Tolstoy's 'War & Peace', and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'Love in the Time of Cholera.'
It is NOT "America, love it or leave it." It is "America, question it if you love it, and keep trying make it better." Otherwise America, like the kingdom of Ozymandias' in Shelley's poem, is destined to become a distant memory. We must challenge our traditions because truth without questioning is false.
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Now, Goldsnow, compare that vibrant praise of America with the following snippet highlighting Europe's incoming police state:
Racism and xenophobia
Belgium has over 900,000 foreign residents, who constitute about 9 per cent of the population. This figure includes around 377,000 non-Europeans (3.7 per cent), of whom 145,000 are Moroccan (1.4 per cent) and 88,300 Turkish (0.9 per cent).
Increasingly in Belgium the far right dictates the terms of discussion about immigration, so much so that debate on the "immigrant problem" has permeated traditional political movements. Although leaders of mainstream parties have to some degree aped the xenophobic rhetoric developed by the VB and the FN (see GENERAL BACKGROUND) to the advantage of these parties, there has also been a movement in mainstream parties to propose "tough policies" to counter the aggression with which the far right makes its demands.
In a leaked document that came into the public domain in the autumn, the high command of the Belgian armed forces claimed that the country's immigrant population is a "new potential enemy". The document accused immigrants of being a clandestine threat through their abilities to carry out acts of sabotage and terrorism. In line with this view, 1,200 reserve officers were asked to gather information about migrants, thereby breaching laws on privacy and data protection.
In July 1996 the Flemish minister for home affairs, Johan Vande Lanotte of the SP, introduced a law on the right of asylum that adopts twelve of the VB's points on immigration policy. With the exception of four deputies from the CVP and the PSC, all the social democrats (including left-wing PS and SP deputies and senators) voted for this law.
Police monitoring of immigrants and foreigners in Belgium has become common-place and is approved of by the minister of the interior.
[...]
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Actually, at one point, former Oostende mayor turned Interior Minister J. Vande Lanotte floated the idea that all the kingdom's postmen could be hired as occasional informants by the Gestapo....
Obviously, the funny thing about such a sordid story is that the very same people who today are spying on immigrants, conspiring within some loony outfit like Gladio, and claiming a jingoist agenda for Belgium, are, at the same time, the quislings and the traitors who, sixty years ago, would have sold their grandmothers --along with their country-- to the Nazis.... Go figure! |
