No matter how much I zoom in, I barely recognize the woman in the blue suit standing in front of the nation’s Capitol. Who is she? Who was she?
It’s odd when I think of the arc of my life, from child to young woman to aging adult. First I was who I was. Then I didn’t know who I was. Then I invented someone, and became her. Then I began to like what I’d invented. And finally I was what I was again. It turned out I wasn’t alone in that particular progression.”
Anna Quindlen on approaching 60
No, as it turns out, Anna Quindlen was not alone.
Once upon a time, I wore sensible suits to work every day – part armor, part costume – a ploy to fool people into believing I knew what I was talking about. Some time during that time, I was invited to speak about K-12 assessment practices to a committee of policy makers at the United States Capitol – a committee comprised of middle-aged men who had, naturally, never taught children. It was my first visit to the nation’s capital, and I loved it – its iconic spaces, its memorials and museums, and the promise of thousands of cherry blossoms the following Spring.
I was uncharacteristically early that morning, as uncomfortable as my professional outfit – wondering after the fact if its blueness might strike the wrong chord, if I should have chosen a more bi-partisan color, perhaps an inoffensive shade of grey. I was nervous, expecting someone on the Committee – someone in a tie – to catch me not knowing what I was talking about. The experts call it “imposter syndrome.” They would probably be right about me. Imposters don’t belong at the Capitol.
Walking the quiet hallways, I paused in front of doors bearing the names of senators I recognized. Tempted to knock but resisting, a reverence and respect for this storied space putting me in my place in my house.
Watching its desecration on television in Mexico that January morning a decade later, thugs descending on my Capitol was one of the most disheartening episodes of my adult life as surreal as watching those planes crash into the Twin Towers. Reliving it in recent weeks, albeit vicariously through previously unheard testimony and unseen footage shared during the House January 6 Committee’s hearings, I am saddened in ways I cannot articulate.
Here’s what I know. I should have known better. I should have known not to be surprised.
Anything can happen.
Seamus Heaney
The tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted
Those overlooked regarded.
There was irony in the Facebook messages from friends and family who had lived through the worst of The Troubles back home, asking if my daughter was safe living in America, the distance between DC and Phoenix irrelevant. It’s all “America.” I think so, I told them. But the truth is – then and now – I don’t believe she is.
The truth is that by the time those rioters had stormed the building, posing for selfies with Capitol police officers, toting Confederate battle flags, chanting in unison to hang the Vice President – a noose hanging from a gallows outside -I was already ashamed of America, ashamed of the citizenship I had acquired after 30 years living there; ashamed of its President – obscene and repugnant – whose 26,237 Tweets showed repeatedly who he was as he spread lies, settled scores, sacked people, and stoked his riotous supporters and co-agitators to take America back – all the way back to a time in the country’s history when women could not decide the course of their own lives, when voting was difficult if not impossible for minorities, when the environment was vulnerable.
Yet over 74 million Americans voted for him twice, and many would do so again in spite of all they know about him and all that is being revealed about him through the course of the House January 6 Committee hearings. They voted for a demagogue with an insatiable appetite for control, a demagogue who made explicitly racist remarks, calling Hispanics “bad hombres,” criminals and rapists; proposing a ban on all Muslims entering the United States; labeling third-world countries shitholes; a man who pandered to white supremacists in Charlottesville and fanned the flames of xenophobia during the pandemic by insisting on referring to the coronavirus as “kung flu.” He pushed conspiracy theories and detained immigrant children and babies in cages along the US-Mexico border and he played golf no less than 25 times as the pandemic killed over 200,000 people. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. I could not stay for one more executive order, one more horrifying Supreme Court ruling, one more assault on democracy, one more mass shooting.
I loved America. I loved it so much that I turned my back on Northern Ireland, trading its violence and instability, its tribal hatreds in the 1980s, for the dream of America – a beacon of democracy and acceptance and inclusivity, of hope and human rights, for so many immigrants like me – as it turns out, it was an impossible dream. I never imagined I would again burn with the shame I had felt in Northern Ireland, ordinary young people like me subjugated by what the late Christopher Hitchens once described as “barbaric, sectarian party leaders.”
The same Star Spangled Banner I had once associated with Bruce Springsteen and Ray Charles, now flies from the front porch of somebody who voted for Trump, somebody who also defends the flag of the Confederacy. Today, these flags occupy the same place in my head as the Union Jacks and Tricolors that mark territory in Northern Ireland – raising or taking either one down enough to spark a deadly riot – symbols not of patriotic pride, but of intimidation and division, often burned with effigies of the Pope, the Queen, and politicians representing different sides.
America – my second home – was supposed to be better than all of that. When they said it was the shining city on the hill and the last best hope on Earth, I believed them. I don’t anymore. I feel duped.
Replaying in my mind those scenes from the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, I am reminded of grainy black and white news footage from Northern Ireland’s troubled streets – baton-wielding police officers wading into frenzied protests and counter-protests, riots, tear-gas, petrol bombs, cars ablaze – death.
So much death.
My plan to escape it began when I was very young, the lure of America ever present. I was never afraid to take what Doris Kearns Goodwin calls that “spectacular risk,” to emigrate. The Dream was mine for the taking. But after spending more than half my life in America, it became clear – especially after the election of Donald Trump – that it was not the dream sold to me.
The young woman in the blue suit is older, and – if not wiser – more jaded, more guarded. I just don’t recognize America anymore, and so I made myself at home in a place that reminds me of postcard-Ireland, a safe place with brightly painted front doors and blue space, where days move at a slow pace and strangers smile and say hello to each other; where church bells peal and roosters crow and children play in the plaza until the sun goes down; where people make things and make do; where music fills the air; where there’s always a bus to the city.
Maybe I’m home at last.
