It is so deeply moving for me to just fly around google earth and explore random places. Get perspectives. I imagine myself there and it shakes me to the core.
Today I found myself flying around Dallas for hours. Getting some cool and moving perspectives, but not much to say. Not much to see in street view. Then I randomly decided to drop a pin in England, street view, and BAM! Instant beauty. (Map Location). It's like that every time - I could drop a pin anywhere in the world outside the US and I have a 95% chance of seeing something wonderful. Beautiful or interesting. Humble, but glorious. Profound and withstanding. Look at this picture I wish such love was etched into our walls. I wish I knew what it was like to truly have a heritage; to really deeply love my country. In a way that I could not describe. To feel the same love you have for your country coming through the ancient chisel strokes of a man you've never met. I have no idea what that feels like. But I feel it in every brick of even the lowest slums in the farthest places on earth.
I feel like we just keep saying "America is great", "freedom!", just because we think we're supposed to, but nobody really feels it. Nobody really believes it. Is it just me? Am I just negative? Am I suffering from "the grass is always greener"? Am I "only happy when it rains"? When I have something to complain about? Or am I sincerely concerned about a very real cultural vacuum? Vanilla. I feel like our flag should just be a decaying white canvas. Like everyone who has come here has left behind their culture, and replaced it with nothing. Every other country has piles and piles of paint upon paint, and they continue to tend to it, but no one has touched ours. No one wants to say something, put something on that canvas, that then they'd have to tend to. But the canvas needs tending itself. And it will disintegrate without paint. But I have no answers, solutions, or solid ideas. How would I have started this experiment differently? I don't know. Maybe I'm just wrong and I can't see what's right in front of me. I mean if I'm right about us having some sort of culture-lacking culture, then how do we produce so much worldwide entertainment? Are we just experts at exploitation, manipulation, and spectacle, unafraid to use shock value and break laws like a cheap hooker because we have nothing else to offer? Are we just turning the world vanilla? Or is there something we really contribute that I just don't see? Is there some deep unspoken unique cultural value in the US that I live and breathe so much I simply don't notice?
I struggle with this every day. I didn't have a tough childhood compared to many, but I have never felt like I was truly a citizen of this country. Accepted. Treated equally, given freedom. A citizen of the world, maybe--at least that made logical sense. In the middle of shithole, TX, I was not given the opportunity in public school to specialize in things that kids in bigger city public schools could--the options were Ag (agriculture) or the horse-shit vanilla version of every subject. I felt neglected and discriminated; forced to participate in a system that hated thinking and learning but required my childhood as payment; surrounded by collections of people that do not care, consisting of individuals that really wanted to, but were okay without, afraid to challenge an imaginary norm, living vicariously through characters in movies who escape it. I just constantly find myself saying, "What the fuck?" I can only imagine what black kids have gone through in poorer communities. What has happened, and what do we do to change it in a real way? How was England able to get over slavery before us and fully integrate black people into their society while the land of the free is still sitting over here with it's thumb up it's ass? 240 years. 240 years of freedom and we just keep inventing new forms of slavery.
Am I just a jerk or what? Let me know. I just want to have real love and pride for where I am and where I came from, and right now it seems like the only way to do that is to be an island unto myself. I want my children someday to have that feeling I've never known.
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