I love America. I wish some of my Arab friends overseas could know the Americans I know - their idealism, goodness, and generosity. I wish that the face of America abroad (through its foreign policy) could reflect the values that I admire and love. Because America, as Bono says, is not just a country. It's an idea.
Recently, while talking about why I love America at the dinner table at home, I welled up with tears when describing to my Jordanian-born father and Syrian-born mother (both my parents are now U.S. citizens) how, unlike many people in the world, Americans will readily give up their life to defend a people they have never met for a just cause. They agreed.
Ironically, one of the people who has most fanned the flame of my love for America has been a Lebanese Christian, one of my closest friends, who is now an American citizen. Having come to the U.S. with her family from a war-ravaged Lebanon in the early 1990s, she had not known a life without the constant threat of bombs (having lived much of her life hiding in bunkers, listening to Simon and Garfunkel). She was my roommate all through college and kept me up at night quoting The Federalist Papers, Thomas Jefferson, and John Locke - making sure I did not take the American experiment or the price of freedom for granted. We would argue until dawn, the way that wide-eyed undergrads do when coming upon universal ideas for the first time, about justice and politics and the Middle East.
But my friend also painted for me a complex picture of Lebanon's political and cultural landscape that I wouldn't have known just living in America. I would not have known the predicament Christian Lebanese felt when forced to choose Israeli or Palestinian allies, simply because they were caught in the middle. - Deanna Murshed
Tags: Lebanon, nationalism
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