Let freedom ring

My last Independence Day in the USA for a while.

Photo by iStrfry , Marcus on Unsplash

Our last full day in America is today, the Fourth of July. Our one-way flight to CPH is tomorrow.

It wasn’t planned that way, it is simply how the flights worked out. But it feels fitting in a way: leaving on the one day of the year built entirely around the idea of this freedom. America doesn’t feel free right now—not to most Americans. And oddly, Denmark, a socialist society, feels more liberated to me. The street we are moving to is actually “Frihedsvej”— literally translated: Freedom Street.

People often assume we are fleeing. That the country is badly broken and we are getting out while we can. I won’t discount the privilege embedded in that assumption, because it is a privilege: moving to a country that is consistently ranked among the happiest in the world, choosing a softer landing when so many people do not get to choose anything at all.

But our motivation was never only about the current reality of living here. Ras is from Copenhagen, his family is there, a community of sisters and 30 first cousins, free healthcare, affordable daycare and free college for our kids. Bicycles instead of cars. A life built around living instead of working hard to scrape by. This was always where we were going to end up, on some timeline, for reasons that have nothing to do with any administration. The politics did not write this chapter, they just happened to be the backdrop while we lived it.

Still, it is a complicated feeling, loving the country I grew up in and everything it meant to me, while mourning what it has become: hate that has risen to the top and settled there like it belongs. This is the country where I built my career from nothing, where I made the friends who feel more like family, where I met my husband (who by the way, is celebrating his first Fourth of July as a citizen tomorrow). This is the country where I gave birth to my daughters. It is not abstract to me, I do not take her for granted: she is the actual shape of my life.

And yet loving her now comes with a kind of gut punch. I do not support this administration. I do not support the hatred aimed at immigrants, the erosion of rights for my daughters and for me because we are women, the bigotry, the racism, the homophobia, the transphobia. I do not support billionaires accumulating more while so many people cannot afford to eat. I do not support checks and balances being treated as a suggestion rather than the structure that was supposed to hold all of this together. I do not support war, money-hungry power or the dismantling of basic human rights. I do not support children being separated from their families, or teachers being told what books they’re allowed to hand a curious kid, or doctors being afraid to give women the care they need.

I do not support the way cruelty gets rebranded as strength, the way fear and blind loyalty gets rebranded as patriotism.

This isn’t what our founding fathers wanted. I don’t think it’s what the majority of Americans today wanted. Saying I love this country does not sit comfortably next to any of the horrors of headlines that bubble up on my phone daily. But I have stopped believing the two are supposed to cancel each other out.

I try to remember, too, that America is young. 250 years, which sounds ancient until you compare it to almost anywhere else. Denmark’s monarchy has been intact for over a thousand years. Most old nations, when they were the age America is now, still had kings who jailed the people who spoke against them, aristocracies that called for someone’s head the moment it protected their money or their power. Cruelty at the top is not a uniquely American invention: it is closer to a phase a country moves through on its way to becoming something else, though I know that offers little comfort to the people living through this phase right now. I am not trying to excuse it: I am trying to remember that broken is not the same as finished.

So how do you love a place and grieve it at the same time? How do you feel relief and sorrow about the same departure, on the same day, in the same breath? I don’t think there is a clean answer. I think you just hold it the way you hold anything too large for one hand: the joy of what this country gave me and the heartbreak of what it is choosing to become, the excitement of Copenhagen and the ache of everything I am not bringing with me.

Today, we will watch fireworks somewhere over American soil for the last time in a while, and I don’t expect the feelings to resolve into anything simple. I expect to tear up, possibly more than once, for reasons that won’t sort themselves into neat categories. Grief for the phase it is in, gratitude for the life it gave me. Relief to be leaving. Shame that leaving feels like relief at all. Responsibility to instill the concept of the American Dream alive for my girls, so they can believe they can be and do anything.

The people I trust most in my life have never been the ones who only tell me what I want to hear. They are the ones who show up without condition and still tell me the truth when I am wrong, who hold me accountable in the moments I would rather not be held accountable, who love me enough to put me in my place instead of just cheering me on. That is what real love looks like to me now, in a friendship or a marriage or a country. Not blind support. Something closer to being challenged toward your best self, again and again, by people who refuse to let you be anything less.

Maybe that is the only kind of patriotism I have left, and the only kind worth keeping: loving America the way I love the people closest to me, which means I do not get to stop telling it the truth just because I am leaving. I will always be from America. I plan to carry the criticism and the love together, the whole distance, for better or for worse.

Happy Fourth.