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2014-07-24 - 2:43 p.m.

So here's a hell of a thing. I've come full-circle on America.

When I was young, if I thought about America at all, it was in a prideful way. We kicked ass in the Olympics. We had more tanks and planes and guns than you. We outlasted the Soviets. We sent money and water and, for some reason, always sacks of grain to hot and brown places when they had earthquakes. We had fifty goddamn states and fifty goddamn state capitals and we had Thomas Jefferson and anyone could become president. Or nearly anyone.

And then, at 18, I went to college, and all of that changed. I didn't know what to think anymore because suddenly, all these smart people around me, in my dorm room, at these scrappy little dangerous fast parties where there was loud rap music, in these classrooms filled with incredibly smart and quick people, all of them were telling me: America's an asshole.

Turns out there was lots of proof. I read everything. I studied American history, the stuff from two hundred years ago (black people, natives, women, later Italians) and the stuff from 50 years ago (black people, women, liberals, later the Vietnamese), and soon I was in total agreement: America's an asshole. I'd go home for holidays, and, in the way of my new 20-year-old heroes, I'd correct and instruct and I was, for a few years, close to intolerable. The American way was the wrong way. The European way or the ancient way or the Muslim way or the any other way, that was the right way. America had sinned and it was the worst sinner and it was corrupt to its core and, the thinking went, it had to be blown up.Yet, now, here I am. It's a few years later. I pay attention to what's going on. I read books. And these other places, they're fighting the battles, still, that have already been won. We know that denying basic rights does not do well for you in the long run. We found that out the hard way. You shut people out of your process, we know how that goes. Look at us. We did it your way, years ago, and it didn't work.

And I'm not saying that America doesn't have problems. Of course it does. America's greedy. America showed everyone else how to burn up all the coal and all the oil and how to build the roads that make a few people very rich and quite a few more people very comfortable. And that's worked out, for most. And we're still a bully and we're only a bully because we're so hard to punch, and one day that'll all probably change. And America's a hypocrite. Yes, it is. And it should know better than to not set by example. It should set by example and does not, not always.

But, I don't know, man. America's pretty all right, too. Women, while they don't get paid as much as they should when they work, they're doing all right. Black folks, while still victims of that great national shame of ours, they're doing better. And you can do whatever religion you want here. And you can buy a stupid fucking gun if you want. And you can vote or you can not vote. You can send your kid to a public school or you can pay a bunch of money and send your kid somewhere else. You can, if you want, go to college, and for not all that much money. You can get a tattoo on your neck if you want and if you're an idiot. You can shout that the president is a foreign-born communist robot controlled by Jewish lawyers, if you want.

What I'm saying is that, sure, I'm getting a little older and whatever burn-it-down I had in me has been cooling off for quite a while now. But I'm also saying that, in this violent, no-sense world, America's pretty good, relatively but also maybe not only just relatively. And I think pretty good is pretty all right.

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