I feel very American this year. Not because the midwest more closely resembles the right’s “great” fantasy of a lost paradise for white people, but because before I got here, after 21 years in Los Angeles, I was ignorant enough to believe that diversity was a coastal phenomenon.

I was remembering the Buffalo I grew up in when picturing this place, and that’s just not what I found. The Twin Cities is certainly viscously racially segregated, like Buffalo was and is, but I’m still surrounded by Hmong and East African immigrants in St. Paul. And within a year of our move, Minneapolis had become the center of the conversation about the institutional abuse of Black Americans.

A few mornings a week I go to a meeting in a club that’s a few blocks from my Target, on the way to Milo’s school, in a Black neighborhood. That would not have happened in my huge, gorgeous LA, which is still viscously segregated by economic class, which still follows race more often than it doesn’t. I miss my beautiful diverse Eagle Rock, but America is changing all over. That’s what they’re so afraid of, I guess.

Everyone I really love is a beautiful disaster, and that still includes this country. But the move convinced me that it will be impossible for “them” to jam the toothpaste of progress back into the tube, no matter how badly they bloody us in the attempt. That gives me hope for our country and helps me breathe a little easier.

Below is how I was feeling in 2018, when we were dog-paddling through the trauma of The Administration I Do Not Speak Of.

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I’ve lived In Eagle Rock a long time…on and off since 1999, more on than off (16 out of the 20 years I’ve been in Los Angeles, to be exact).

Our family moved to this house while I was pregnant in September of 2009, and our Councilmember put on the first fireworks show at the Rec Center in 2010, when Milo was almost 6 months old.

We didn’t go to that first one, but we took him to the second one in 2011 when he was a toddler. Every year since he has watched the fireworks from my lap.

Last night…he didn’t.

He sat on a blanket with his friends, and got up and danced when they played his favorite song. He eventually did come collapse onto me for a few minutes, giving me a sweet sticky kiss. But then he got restless and jumped up again.

I had some feelings about this.

A few years ago he moved his little baby camp chair to sit with another family, and I burst into tears. Nathan held me and walked me through it…but then once the actual fireworks started, Milo came back and climbed into my lap. So last night, when the fireworks started and it was clear that Milo was elsewhere, Nathan grabbed my hand and squeezed it, because he is wonderful and he is my person and he understood.

But I was already crying. And though it was partially because I was tender about the whole “Circle Game” child-growing-up business (which I understand and approve of intellectually, but about which I will still get all emo because…motherhood, I guess), what actually unleashed the flow of tears was the stupid fucking national anthem.

Our Councilmember gave a speech touching on how proud he was to be a Mexican-born immigrant, but how equally proud he was to be an American. And I looked around me at my laughably diverse NELA neighborhood, at my friends and neighbors, immigrants and children of immigrants, all full of churros and pupusas and Italian ices and Canadian beer, staring up at the darkening sky. And then a recent high school graduate sang the national anthem.

Things are so hard right now, but apparently I still love and believe in this stupid fucking country, despite myself. Bombs bursting in air, the flag still being there…land of the free, home of the brave…the whole magilla. None of it is true but all of it is true, and it’s an ideal people still come here from all around the world to pursue, even when we are horrible to them.

I grew up in America. I have been hearing and singing that song my whole life. I guess it has some sort of express lane into my heart that bypasses my brain.

And then (because our Councilmember gets it) when the sky filled up with sparkling light it was to the sound of Neil Diamond’s “Coming To America” and Neil Young’s “Rockin’ In The Free World” and Randy Newman’s “I Love LA”. And my kid joined a bunch of kids & grandkids of immigrants to ham it up and do that goofy floss dance to a song he loves by a guy named “Portugal”, the chorus of which is “might be over now, but I feel it still”.

All while my Facebook feed fills up with liberals claiming they want to move to Canada.

I had cried over the kids separated from their parents. I mean, I don’t know how you can call yourself human if you didn’t. But last night was the first time I cried over my country.

I don’t know anything anymore, but I know that last night I was in a park on “American” soil, surrounded by brown people and white people and every kind of person, all eating and dancing and watching our children running around in the dusk with light-up plastic Dollar Store crap made in China, sold to them for cash from a cart at a ridiculous mark-up by vendors who may or may not be here legally but either way have to get their hustle on, and it was all breathtakingly painful and beautiful. America is gorgeous and broken and ridiculous.

And it might be over now.

Maybe we never had it in the first place.

But I guess I feel it still.