America the Bountiful (It's Not What It Seems)
The land of the free and the home of liberty – where the barefooted youngsters fear no bombs falling from the sky, where Ramen noodles and Spagetti-o's flow, where a nation's pain is solved by flying little flags from every conceivable nook and cars bearing bumperstickers with the phrase "United We Stand," where women say what they feel and wear (or don't wear) what they want. Yes, that's America condensed like Cambell's tomato soup.
We bicker about mothers aborting an unborn child and whether marijuana should be legalized all in one breath, then turn to our neighbor to complain about our laptop's latest inconvenience, all while sitting in an air-conditioned school costing forty-thousand dollars a year. We have the convenience of launching into long flighty speeches over the telephone friends across the country. We meet people from India, Germany, Sri Lanka, Florida, and Mexico all in one night – connected by our fingertips in an electronic world. We learn about the latest political scandal and are enticed by Toucan Sam leaping from animated lime to lemon as we watch television and sit in an armchair sipping cappucino with furry slippers on. America the Bountiful: a snuggly warm land flowing with homogenized, pasturized, advertised milk and preserve-free honey, fresh like our clothes smell if we use the new and improved Bounty bleach.
Our name is our passport – one small piece of plastic earned with two tests takes us from vast oceans to barren deserts, spattered suburbs to bustling cities, rocky mountains to rolling plains. There is little worry of armed gunmen dragging us from our cars, or suicidal radicals blowing themselves up on our busses. No one demands a passport as we travel from one state to the next, and we are comforted by familiar ditties like "Don't Worry, Drive Happy," as we speed down our paved highways with our children safely buckled in the backseat. Remember, of course, the additional comfort of airbags and childsafety locks. We hook alarm systems in our houses and hang rifles above our beds, snuggling into down pillows and blankets with the heat going, knowing that we're perfectly safe.
We cast our votes, sign our draftcards, talk politics, never fearing that a military personnel will walk up our driveways and take our sons. We call the police knowing that they will come, never fearing that we will be ourselves jailed unjustly. Fair trials are a guarantee - just ask Rubin Carter.
We walk down the street with change jingling in our pockets, purchasing bottled soda with a picture of Michael Jordan slam-dunking on the label and a chocolate bar, picking out the nuts and tossing them to the ground, although our parents always warned us sweets would rot our teeth; of course, if that happens we can just go to pay the dentist a visit, which is partially paid by the insurance provided by our job. Down the street we go, past coffee shops and vending machines, computer shops and book stores, carefully sidestepping the wads of gum on the road to avoid marring our 160 dollar sneakers – our third pair this year. We get annoyed when it's raining outside, we frown as we pull out our umbrellas and put on our overcoats, worrying that it may streak our make-up or wash out the gel in our hair. We don't penny-pinch over a loaf of bread.
Our freedom, our happy ignorance of real suffering, our snug houses with automatic washers and automatic garage doors and automatic smiles, is the best part of America.
[11.20.02]
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