Australians love to talk about American politics. Everybody has an opinion, from teenagers on the bus to my university professors and the cab driver picking me up from the airport. Cheeky boys in bars flirtatiously ask if I need a green card now. I don’t. I’m not staying, even though more and more people here and at home are telling me that I should. I love Sydney, but I want to come home.
When I talk to Australians about America I usually defend myself and my home by making a divide. What you see on TV, what you interpret from our politics, is not what I experience, I say. I say, I live in New York. My friends are diverse, engaged, smart. My America is welcoming. It is well-educated and for the most part well-off. This is all true of my experience, and it all allows me to distance myself from the parts of the country that I, because of my many privileges, because of chance, sometimes because of willful ignorance, don’t see. So of course I want to go back to that version of America. It’s nice there.
Since I’ve been here, I seem to have also divided my understanding of myself. In my head there is a difference between “Home Hannah” and “Abroad Hannah”. It’s not to say that Abroad Hannah is some kind of evil twin – she’s more like Peter Pan’s shadow, recklessly freed from the restraints of the real figure. Being abroad is amazing but it is hard, hard to make all new friends, to be so physically far from family, to stand on your feet on the other side of the world. So often I have watched myself, dream-like, as I make bad choices and barely escape real consequences. I don’t do this at home. I plan. I think things through. And I’ve convinced myself, on some level, that the “real me” is that person, the smart one, the one who cares, the planner.
That isn’t true. Being here has made me better in a lot of ways – I’m more independent, my confidence is more genuine, I’ve gained a greater sense of adventure – but probably the biggest way is that I am far more aware of the things about me that are ugly. I feel different, and I might even seem different, but I am the same shape I always was. These nasty parts were always there. So I try to control them, although I probably can’t vanquish them altogether. That, I guess, is part of being human.
I know, likewise, that there aren’t two Americas. My world is not exculpated from the racism, sexism, Islamaphobia, xenophobia, general hatred that seems to be swallowing the country right now. It exists in New York just like anywhere else. It exists in Australia too, of course, hatred isn’t unique to the US. Some white Australians like to claim that Australia just doesn’t have a race problem, despite the systematic oppression of Aboriginal people from pretty much the moment of white settlement. But they draw a divide: there’s what happened to the Aboriginal people then, and there’s now. That line between past and present doesn’t really exist. These issues aren’t new and they haven’t gone away, they’re not restricted to any one place and they were always obvious to many people who don’t share my level of privilege, of oblivion. In a lot of ways they’re ingrained into the systems of this country, and they aren’t issues that will simply calm down, or fall away with time.
So in the next couple weeks I won’t defend the United States to anyone. And I won’t just think about going home to my little America, with all of its securities. I’m coming home acknowledging the ugly side of the country, and more than that, preparing to fight it. In The Crack-Up, F. Scott Fitzgerald says, “The test of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” I hope to be able to do just that. I hope to look at myself in the mirror sometimes and see that I am flawed, but still try to better myself. I am looking at my country right now, from a distance, and seeing a place so full of injustice that it seems insurmountable, and yet I am determined to make it otherwise.