| From Whence I Came By Jim Correale (Published in the East Boston Sun Transcript on August 31, 2001.) Saturday was a beautiful sunlit day, and in the afternoon I went for a walk down Newbury Street and over to the Charles River with some friends. In our group were three young women from Italy who are visiting for a while and staying in East Boston. Our conversation covered a number of topics, mostly differences between life in America and Italy. After a while we walked toward downtown Boston and took the subway back to Eastie. Riding on the Blue Line, our discussion continued and I said that, in general, Europeans know much more about the world outside of their own country than people in the US do. Many Americans cannot name a world leader besides our own president, while throughout the world people always know who our chief executive is. The nations of Europe are small and a few dozen are crammed into a land mass not much larger than the US. Throughout history, the actions of one country on that continent have greatly affected all of the rest. Citizens there have to know and understand the people and cultures of their neighbors. Meanwhile, in America, we have only one neighbor bordering us to the north and one to the south, and both have been allies for a long time. Our economy, as well as out military and our culture, affects virtually everyone else on the planet. Americans don't worry much about threats from the outside. We used to be wary of the Soviet Union, but today's Russian military couldn't provide security at a rock concert. We are, for the most part, comfortable and unaware of what is going on in the rest of the world. Every once in a while, there is a story in the paper or on television about how American high school students cannot point out Asia, or Africa, or even North America on a globe. Many cannot even find their state or city on a map. We are notoriously bad at geography. All of this came up in conversation as we rode home on the T. When the doors opened at Maverick station we stepped off the train, along with a bunch of other people, including a middle-aged woman who had been standing next to us. The woman, her hair in a gray braid, looked right at me and yelled, "You know, if you don't like it in this country, go back where you came from!" We were all a bit stunned. I looked at my friends, and then said to the woman, who was now moving away from us, "I'm from East Boston! I was born here!" The woman said nothing. I'm not sure why, but I yelled out, "I'm an English teacher!" In response, as she made her way through the turnstiles, the woman said, "Yeah, and I'm a professor at Harvard!" And then she was gone. We laughed, but I was also disturbed by the exchange. First of all, I was only stating facts: because of our position in the world -- our wealth, our strength, our influence -- Americans know little about what goes on elsewhere. More unsettling, however, is this idea that it is bad or even wrong to criticize the country. That is ridiculous and such beliefs would put the US more in line with communist China or extremist Afghanistan. That is, I hope, the opposite of what we want to be. America has always been about citizens having the right to political dissent. The US Constitution guarantees that we can "petition the government for a redress of grievances." That is an admission that the government is not always taking the proper course. To hold the "America: love it or leave it" point-of-view is ignorant and dangerous to one of our most cherished principles: free speech. I'm not sure what the woman who yelled at me thinks will happen if people openly criticize the country, but I agree with Mark Twain, who wrote: "I remember when I was a boy I heard repeated and repeated time and time again the phrase, 'My country, right or wrong, my country!' How absolutely absurd is such an idea." |