The first time I stepped OUT of this country solo I was 20 years old, headed abroad en busca d’aventura. While everyone I grew up with was running down to their first freakniks, I was pointed at the pebble beaches of Nice, Monaco and Mykonos, with a bunch of money from different countries, rail passes and a backpack one third the size of the sherpa packs every other also newbie expat I ran into had strapped to themselves.
Real estate in my underground princess satchel was at a premium so I didn’t have much…but the one thing I DID have and rocked all the time was a string bikini emblazoned with the American flag.
That first trip to Europe alone was the first time I experienced what it was like to be seen as an American, first. & it changed my life. It also never left me. Long before I was yowling about God I was telling every person of color that I knew that they HAD to get out of this country…to feel what it truly feels like to be FROM the United States of America.
There is NOTHING…like being a Black American Woman on this planet but being a Black American Woman on this planet. & getting to experience that as a positive was the best intel gift I had to give, and gave it I have for nearly 30 years.
And when AOLAB started staying primarily stateside to finally explore what was in my own backyard…that flag went with me in new forms. Lowkey like Linus, a sarong protectively swaddling my hips one day, warming my neck on a chilly day in the high desert on another. Think I burned her on a pyre up in Taos, so she wouldn’t have to stick around and see what would become of this place.
Even getting trump’s nycboy schtick…what he really stole from a generation of kids who weren’t allowed to feel safe at home or welcomed abroad has been felt acutely by me. I’ve watched the world teeter on the brink of saying it’s just better to live looking at the screenshot landscapes that make up META and reality TV and just all this stuff…that cuts us off from who we are and our rightful place in the world…
I mean that as a generation, as a country.
This fucker stole a lot. For a long time.
So when I sit here now…having fun with fashist flights of fancy for Kamala… I see kids volunteering in hoodies this fall , shyly going door to door, pushing through the fear of their fellow neighbors that has been the worst toxin inflicted upon us all in all of this. I see that they’re completely unaware that on the other side of November the whole world could be waiting for them to come and explore. Kids who had their socializing school experiences impacted by all this vitriol and incompetence… with no idea that people in ALL the countries tuned into what’s happening here with Harris and Waltz with hitched breath can’t wait to embrace them out on the road once this latest generation gets to flood safely out onto the road in search of adventure AS proud, yet open Americans, just like their ancestors and elders got to.
I have experienced the tangibility of the hope they are speaking of incessantly at the Democratic National Convention in real time, across my life.
There really is something to getting to be From here, of here, no matter how the society at large may try to take that from you.
Something that is going to hit these kids like wildfire, like a fucking Jubilee…
if we can all get our shit together and swarm this motherfucker and his minions out the way for a better and brighter day.
AngelBrynner
You can’t tell me it’s a fairytale to be able to be happy you are born and raised here as a Black American. It’s not a pipe dream. I’ve lived it. for decades. A lot of GenXers who came up in the age of the United colors of Benetton campaigns have, all over this planet. I even have the sneaking suspicion that all Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter-isms were keying into similar collective memories so many of us had to put away.
But…these people in this country living in huddles of fear of everything that doesn’t look like what they see in the mirror aren’t just afraid of everything they see as other. They rarely go more than five miles away from their home base without agita.
That’s why the big city fear mongering works.
To them, for the past 16 years…he may as well have been speaking about OZ when he’s darkly rhapsodic about the border, tornado wormholes to new worlds and all…