Ahsen Jillani
By Ahsen Jillani
Once upon a time… heh heh… just kidding.
But really, once upon a time in August of 1979, I was an 18-year-old smoking a cigarette at JFK airport in NYC waiting on a shuttle to take me to LaGuardia Airport. I was strangely calm, having left home for the first time to attend college in the U.S. The air smelled a little different from Bangkok, a humid and bustling tropical city that I had left two days earlier on three days’ notice to attend college in North Carolina.
Over the next couple of months, many friends and relatives contacted me asking how I was adjusting to life in America. Standing at some phone booth or lounging on my rental couch (special student apartment package for $63/month), I would tell them all the same tired story: I felt nothing different in America.
This was the incredible power America exerted over the planet due to its enviable and intimidating influence. Even before attending American International Schools in Southeast Asia, I was intimately familiar with American culture. I was assigned a host family in Charlotte and was later adopted by my roommate’s host family as well. They expected someone totally green coming out of some village, and were shocked at the breadth of my knowledge about the U.S.
One can call it the Cold War era propaganda campaign, or the tremendous pull of the capitalistic P.R. machinery that was a magical net cast over the planet. Everyone knew about Coca Cola, M&M chocolates, burgers, Chevys, the Statue of Liberty, the Grand Canyon; about Disney and Steve McQueen, about Farrah Fawcett and Elvis, and about Hollywood and the Empire State Building. Being a U.N. brat, I also knew a disturbing but humorous side of America. The diplomats America sent abroad to represent it, I much later learned, were often presidential appointees who had weird resumes. These folks could be farmers, gun shop owners, or even weird real estate developers.
I remember standing at my parents’ cocktail party as a 17-year-old, and the American diplomat assigned to Asia asking an ambassador, “So, where is this country of yours, Sri Lanka?” Even then I wondered, this guy inappropriately dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, shorts and flip flops didn’t even bother looking at a map on the 20-hour flight over. But call it confidence, callousness, arrogance or ignorance, these were bigger than life, jolly characters and everybody smiled and knew what they were talking about when they mentioned chili dog cookouts on the 4th of July.
For decades, puzzled people would tolerate back slaps, and a shocking disregard for local traditions from loud people, but we all knew America to be a colorful mix of excitable folks. America’s dominance in the P.R. battle that was the Cold War was an asset. You knew the culture, even on remote islands; you wanted to be there because they liked to party, because things were colorful and bright, because business was good and you had hope. Even the most uptight places on earth took their dollars and smiled, because, well, America was America.
There’s no point discussing the history in too much detail now. The Spaniards, the French, the Portuguese, the Dutch, and many other European powers were rattling around the area way before the Anglo-Saxons established themselves in North America, which already contained at least 30 million natives. The natives mostly disappeared because of many complex reasons, without so much as an apology for that, for slavery, for land grabs, for wars that some historians clearly say were imperialist ambitions of a callous colonizer.
Regardless of the history, the Founding Fathers had a keen understanding of what brutal monarchies can do to a people. They drew from the 13th century Magna Carta, British common law, and from pure common sense to break away from the tyranny. Yes, mistakes were made in how the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were crafted to exclude slaves, to ignore the rights of the natives who possessed this land for, some evidence suggests, may have been 10,000 years. But at least we had a set of laws.
America spent 250 years tweaking the details from the Declaration, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution, and amendments, and showed an uncompromising desire to argue and revise the intent of these landmark documents. That has made this nation not quite perfect but at least admitting that it continues to journey toward a noble goal. We can say that this nation was founded with Judeo-Christian principles, and that propelled it into being the greatest humanitarian society in world history. If that’s the case, did we fulfill the promise of what our religions taught?
So, what is going on with the country at this 250 years juncture?
We are not a country that suspends habeas corpus and due process. When people die of starvation and disease when the food and medication are already sitting in Africa, because we cut off aid, something has gone wrong. When people say immigrants should come into the country through legal channels and then entire families are pushed around and fathers arrested in the corridors of immigration courts where they are carrying paperwork to pursue citizenship, something has gone wrong.
You can add a thousand other instances to argue the dismantling of America. No religion supports any of this. Nations that have progressed past this annihilation of the global economy have lost faith in the greatest gift that America had ever offered to people around the world: The law, which is above any person; the compassion offered by perhaps this 800-pound gorilla that was a beacon of hope for everyone who had a dream of a better life. The world is moving on. When the brand names, the respect, the humility, the kindness all fade, when the soft power fades, what type of country will emerge?
We are America! Let’s do better.
Ahsen Jillani lives in Mint Hill, NC with his cat Goofus. Contact: ajillani@carolina.rr.com
