life off balance

i have a bunch of posts that i’ve been meaning to write. there is one that i’ve been meaning to write since we got back from scotland in november, about what it means to be an american. when i got home, michelle (i don’t think she wants links to her blog or else i’d post the link) had posted the following quote from a website about “rad america”:

One of the things we focused on was making your one square foot totally tight. It’s just the idea that there are a lot of things done in the name of our country that we don’t want to be a part of, and sometimes it’s hard to be proud of being an American. But you can make the space that you personally occupy however you want it to be, no matter where you are. If each one of us makes the square foot we occupy totally tight, eventually there will be that one person that shifts the tides and all of America will be rad again.

i told michelle “remind me to tell you about my thoughts on ‘one square foot’ of america if i don’t blog about it soon.” and then i proceeded to neither blog about it nor tell michelle my thoughts.

and then the other day i was listening to strike anywhere (yeah i know, suck it up, i love this band), and i realized that their song “the promise” expresses the sentiments that i never got around to sharing with michelle:

this is america yeah it’s true
but everything else is false that was taught to me and you
i’ll try to sort it out
i’ll try to sort it out with you
did you promise the world that you’d change it?
sounds like the way that i feel
one brick thrown, one vote alone,
won’t take back everything they steal
we’ll take back everything they steal
we’re all walking forward

so after that long, drawn-out introduction, i’ll get to the point. what i realized in scotland is that america is me. it is me and trav and michelle and you at least just as much as it is george bush or dick cheney or bill o’reilly or some loud obnoxious tourist with a fanny pack and a sense of entitlement. their square feet of america do not trump ours. if anything, our square feet trump theirs. i’m more representative of this country than george bush, because i love this country more than he does. he pretends to love it, but no one who loves this country would treat it the way he does. so i’m not embarrassed to be american. i was proud to go to scotland as an american. to show them that america is not george bush. to promise the world that we’ll change it.

before, i had interpreted the word “it” in that line as referring to “the world.” but now i think it refers to america. to me, the song is about how we are america and, yeah we’ve got our problems. but we are going to sort it out. we’ll take back everything they steal. i don’t know if this is what thomas and the guys meant in writing that song, but that’s what it means to me.

ok, now i promise not to write anything about strike anywhere for at least a few weeks.

oh, and that picture is of the new scottish national parliament building in edinburgh. scotland has an independent parliament for the first time in hundreds of years, and they just finished building a new home for it (amid much controversy, actually). i found it incredibly moving to see this new building and realize what it means to the scottish people.