the happiest place on earth

I went off the deep end today in Target. 

One of the things I hate to hear as a progressive or as a liberal (which ever yarmulke I’m wearing which ever day) is that we don’t love America as much as the rest of you do.  Being able to look to the other democracies and republics on the planet and saying, “they have an interesting approach to summer break in Germany,” isn’t saying that I want to dig up George Washington’s bones and pee on them. 

We do things differently in America, not always better or worse, differently. 

I was in Target and two boys were having an incredibly epic lightsaber duel in the aisles.  I don’t think people appreciated what a big deal this lightsaber duel was or how stupid it is to get involved or try to break it up.  I just imagine someone’s mother in cinnamon buns saying, “If you get a lightsaber for Christmas you’re going to lose a hand!” ala Christmas Story. 

I’m not going to tell you why I claimed to be the parent of these two boys when this went down because I’m not sure I know but I’m glad I did.  They very accidentally molested someone with their lightsabers and this someone wasn’t from here and he unreasonably blew up at them.  Maybe it was the fact that Vicki and I have had a lightsaber duel when were both twenty-nine in IKEA maybe it is because I was that five-year-old (I swear to God, I still am).  Maybe it was my belief as a teacher that we expect boys in America to be people they're not – if Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were real boys today we’d put them on medications and label them, “retarded,” or “criminal,” and most likely both. 

This man angrily explained how in his country they raised children differently and that I was a terrible parent.  I apologized again and let him know that I felt his frustration and could see where his reaction came from.  There are only so many tines I can hear, “In my country,” in a single diatribe before I get annoyed but where the man stuck his hand into my cage was when he started a sentence with, “This is why America and the West are inferior to my country…” because I have a lot to say about that as a Lutheran Democrat, Jewish in ethnicity, driving a Volkswagen and using Apple products, because while “America and the West,” do a lot wrong if your country was so expletive wonderful I’d be shopping at a Target in his hometown instead of him being in my Target.  I quoted one of my elderly coworkers with, “If you don’t like it here there is a boat leaving every day.” 

 If it were terrible here people wouldn’t come here for our freedoms.  We’d be in his wonderful country with their modern conveniences and problems.  The United States has so much it needs to fix from the Shermon Minton Bridge to the tax code to the idea that some of us pay taxes at all to our attitudes toward each other but even with that we’re still far superior to many other places you could live. 

Also, if we get nothing else right in America we get deodorant right.  One thing that crosses all lines in America is a love and enthusiastic use of soap and deodorant.    We’re a very pretty smelling people.  I’ve been to your country; you don’t do like we do.  I’m fine with you never, ever learning English (we don’t have an official language and all the people who want one are terrible at English anyway) if you learn not to smell bad.  I will never talk to you but I will have to smell you. 

I’m entirely confident that I will be a bad parent.  I’m not going to beat my kids and feed them garbage but if my kids had an epic lightsaber duel in Target and didn’t manage to break anything I’d not be unhappy with that.  If I have kids – and that’s not in humanity’s best interest – I hope they’re not the banal twerps you usually see at Target and I hope they love America for all the things that make it wonderful and horrible but unique and most of all livable.  

 

Comments

[Oregongurl]

This was epic, and I am dying to repost it. Knowing you makes me happy, loving you is such an honor, I truly mean that. Really truly.