What To An Immigrant Is The 4th Of July?
I was 19 when I moved to this country from Romania (that is in Eastern Europe, is different from Hungary and Bulgaria, and was never actually a part of the Soviet Union; also Dracula and Ceausescu; YW)
I was a genuinely privileged case. I had met an American boy and wanted to move for him, but my grades were good enough and my parents wealthy enough that I was able to come here on a student visa. The American boy and myself stayed together for 20 years and had 2 kids -- and that's not bad for getting together at age 19!
I got my Green Card during my senior year of college and my citizenship 3 years after. This was after 9/11, but way before the Trump-era, several years-long immigration timelines for first degree relatives. Once again, lucky.
Here are some things that I have done as an American between the ages of 20 (then) and 40 (now) that I wouldn't have been able to do if I had stayed in my native country. Most of them are small, but that's exactly the point. The feeling tone, that is to say the experience, of life lies mostly in the small things.
I went to school with people whose young lives had looked very different from mine.
I ate food from several dozen culinary traditions.
I walked down city streets without being harassed.
I had thousands of polite, positive interactions with folks behind the counter, folks on the phone, and folks on the street.
I got jobs based solely on my merits.
I chose a career that I didn't go to school for, and advanced in it based solely on my merits.
I birthed my children at home, attended by midwives.
I taught children in private schools with wildly different approaches.
I ended a marriage, and sold a house, and made a trans-continental move without harming my reputation and earning power.
I started over at age 39.
There is a fundamental openness, a lack of suspicion, and an inherent curiosity to the American mindset that is difficult to convey to outsiders -- or at least to Europeans, the only outsider group I can claim first-hand familiarity with. Americans will pull over to help you change a flat; they'll give well-meaning advice to strangers in a coffee shop; they'll naturally connect across ethnic and religious divides, yes, they'll do so more every day than most enlightened Europeans will do in a month.
For all its flaws, the US is still a city on a hill: not for its conspicuous wealth, not for its cultural ascendancy, but for its stubborn, fundamental belief that all humans are equally dignified by virtue of being human.
Happy Independence Day!