Happy 4th of July to all who celebrate!

please bear with me while I explain why I feel like crap

Photo by Logan DeBorde on Unsplash

I wrote the post below exactly a year ago. Remember a year ago? Seems like a lifetime, doesn’t it? Remember 9/11, which seems like a million lifetimes ago? Specifically, the part where you couldn’t get an American flag anywhere for any money because everyone in the country was knit together by collective grief and horror and flying an American flag seemed like the least any of us could do? I believe to this day that we—all of us, everyone in the country—would have done anything to help. We would have accepted gasoline rationing. We would have lined up to donate blood. We did line up to donate blood. We would have done whatever was asked of us, because we were united, as a country, as a people.

Instead, George Bush told us to go shopping, because if we didn’t, the terrorists would win. And we did, with gusto. So much so that in 2008, a crowd of over 2,000 people surged through Walmart doors on Black Friday and trampled a temporary stock clerk to death in their rush to score holiday bargains.

I think about that a lot because my parents and I came here from Soviet Russia in 1977, less than one year after America’s bicentennial, lured in part by the promise of freedom and in part by the promise of capitalism. I was nine at the time, and it took me a minute to understand that some people benefit from capitalism and others get trampled by it.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote a year and a lifetime ago. The original title of the post was “This is not a political post, but it’s the 4th of July and I have mixed feelings,” but there’s no escaping that everything is political now, including the fact that before posting it, I paused to wonder if I should be posting it—especially as a naturalized citizen who could be denaturalized and deported.

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In 1976, the year that marked the bicentennial of the American colonies’ exit from the British Empire, my parents were planning our exit from the Soviet Union. They gathered all the requisite documents—their marriage certificate, our internal Soviet passports, our birth certificates—and applied for an exit visa, an action which would strip them of their Soviet citizenship and their jobs and plunge them into a limbo of anxious waiting until permission to emigrate was granted in early 1977. (My family was lucky: some applicants waited months or even years for a decision only to have their application to leave the country turned down for arbitrary reasons, or for no reason at all.)

No one shared our plans with eight-year-old me because I had a big mouth and the fewer people in our 1960s-era multi-story cinderblock apartment building on the edge of Moscow knew we were planning to leave the country, the better.

Long story short: my parents and I landed in San Francisco in early February of 1978. We had been admitted to the United States as political refugees; within a few years, we had green cards (which were not really green), and in fall of 1985, after my disastrous trip to Europe which ended 72 hours after it began because of improper paperwork (more about that in my memoir), we received American citizenship.

Photo by Global Residence Index on Unsplash

Let me tell you something: there aren’t many people more patriotic than naturalized citizens. It takes a lot to decide to uproot yourself and abandon the place you were born, hoping that the place you’re heading to will take you in. The place we were heading to not only took us in, but delivered on its promise in a big way, and we were forever grateful. We were Team USA all the way. We could not believe our luck in ending up in this country, where there was never a defitzit (shortage) of anything and where you had more choices than you knew what to do with—what to eat, what to read, what to watch, what to say, what to think, who to believe. We watched Moscow on the Hudson and nodded knowingly when Vladimir, a Russian saxophonist who decides to defect to the US during an international tour, encounters a brain-breaking array of choices during his first excursion to an American supermarket. We had felt exactly that way during our first excursion to an American supermarket.

Even before we came to America, my father was smitten by the American dream. When I was six or seven, he drew an American flag on a piece of paper and explained what the stars and the stripes stood for—the 13 American colonies, the 50 states, all joined together by a commitment to freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom for everyone regardless of whether they were rich or poor, Christian or Jewish or Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist, black or white or brown. He tore up the picture of the flag after he finished explaining (Moscow, Cold War, etc.) but I had never seen him so giddy. My father is not a giddy person.

He wasn’t wrong to be giddy about America. America was good to us, and we loved it in part because it was not the Soviet Union. It was its exact opposite. Free enterprise was revered, not reviled; we could say anything we wanted about the American government or the Soviet government or any government we pleased. I could go to any college if I worked hard enough, and if my high school indifference to academics limited my choices, that was my own fault. We could attend services in a synagogue without feeling unsafe. My mother and I idolized Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s—even though it was Jimmy Carter who made it possible for us to leave the Soviet Union—because Carter was a loser who was responsible for high gas prices and the mess at the American embassy in Tehran and Reagan embodied the indomitable, can-do American spirit. Even though Reagan himself was not young, he was vigorous and forward-looking and optimistic. He said things about America that we very much wanted to believe. He made it seem like anything was possible.

The Soviet Union was a country of old men. They—Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko—stood stiffly at attention during the military parades on the Red Square, the same ossified faces, the same ponderous jowls. America was surging forward while the USSR was stagnating. America was a meritocracy, a young country immune from the barbarism baked into the Russian soul. In America, no one beheaded their enemies and set their heads atop fence posts. In America, there were no gulags. In America, everyone was equal. When I was a sophomore in college, the professor who taught my Literature of the Gilded Age seminar asked the class how many of us believed that America is an egalitarian, classless society and I confidently raised my hand, and she looked at me like I was profoundly stupid. I sat there and thought, Am I missing something?

It turned out I was missing a lot. It turned out there was a difference between vision and reality. It turned out that freedom in America extended to being able to bet against subprime-mortgage-based bonds and being able to buy military-grade weapons that fire 60 rounds per minute as well as accessories that can enable those weapons to fire even more. It turned out that some people had more freedom than others. It turned out that we have arrived at a moment in which we are almost exactly four months out from an election in which two old men will vie to be president of the United States. Each of those two men is older than Leonid Brezhnev was when he died.

Brezhnev, who was the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet when my parents and I left the Soviet Union, died in 1982 of a heart attack precipitated by arteriosclerosis—a hardening of the arteries. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. One might argue that what happened to Brezhnev’s arteries happened, on a much bigger scale, to the Soviet Union: a nation founded on a utopian vision had become a calcified and inefficient bureaucracy, adhering to an absolutist doctrine that had nothing to do with reality.

This is not a political post. I don’t want to sound unpatriotic or ungrateful—especially toward a country that has given so much to my parents, to me, to my aunts and uncles and cousins and grandmothers. I don’t want people to read this and tell me to go back where I came from. I have absolutely no desire to go back where I came from. But I don’t think it’s unpatriotic to acknowledge that the country which has given me so much has taken so much from others, or to point out that laws that might have served the population of the United States in 1776 may not be suited to the population of the United States in 2024.

In my Moscow elementary school, Soviet children were taught that the Great Patriotic War began in June 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and ended in May 1945, after the Red Army marched into Berlin. In the US, I was shocked to learn that the Great Patriotic War was actually a part of a world war that involved not just the USSR and Nazi Germany but more than 70 countries and was fought on all the continents except Antarctica. I was equally shocked to learn that it lasted not four years, as I had been taught, but nearly six—beginning in September 1939 with the German invasion of Poland and ending in August 1945 after the United States dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The world, I discovered, was much bigger—and far more complicated—than I thought it was. Thank god I was living in a country that allowed me to learn the full truth about whatever I wanted, a country that would never rewrite history or insist on pledges of absolute loyalty or shut down questions or impose a rigid ideology on all its citizens under penalty of imprisonment or worse.

I know. I’m being a killjoy on America’s birthday. I’m not wearing red, white, and blue. I did not make a cake with white frosting and decorate it with strawberries and blueberries. We didn’t even barbecue. But I still believe in the promise of this country; I believe that we can do better, be better, speak up, question, step out of line, raise our voices, engage in conversations instead of shouting matches, acknowledge the things this country got very, very right as well as very, very wrong, be willing to change, to learn, to grow, to find common ground.