This last couple of weeks, while I've been home sick (first after minor surgery, then with acute sinusitus), I've been lucky enough to have a stack of Netflix discs here. I watched the series From the Earth to the Moon again after seeing it for the first time a couple of years after it was broadcast on HBO. I've enjoyed it as much the second time; perhaps even more, but in a very unexpected way.
The series shows the best side of the America I love, our can-do spirit, our ingenuity, our open-heartedness. I lived in Europe as an exchange student twice, and each time these were the things I missed about my fellow Americans. When I got home, it was delightful to smile back at the open, friendly faces and have a sense of belonging here.
From the Earth to the Moon made me feel just plain damn good to be an American again—and then I realized how long it had been since I'd felt that way. Let's get one thing straight right now, though—nobody from outside can make me feel BAD about being an American; rather, it's our own actions that affect my sense of my own country. In my years as an exchange student, I spent a hell of a lot of time debunking European prejudices against us, as well as delivering swift reality checks to snotty pseudointellectuals. "America, right or wrong" isn't an argument, and educated Europeans, however snotty and condescending they can sometimes be, are good at arguing. To hold my own with them, I had to understand myself and my country, the good and the bad together, and to be able to articulate what I understood. I only hope I left behind some tiny fraction of the great understanding and knowledge that I gained there.
Digression over. The down side to this recovered feeling of pride in country is the sick-making comprehension of what we have lost in the last six years. It's not just a matter of reputation, which is something that waxes and wanes. Maybe a better word is "stature." After the war crimes committed in our name by our elected (sort of) officials and representatives, we have lost much of the moral high ground that we attained after the Second World War and during the Cold War. One fact is telling: in the spring of 1945, after the fall of Berlin and the Russian occupation of the eastern half of Germany, the defeated Germans fled en masse, when they could, to American-occupied sectors of their country, in the complete certainty that they would be treated humanely there. That kind of certainty in our decency and goodwill is gone now, and its loss means more than the ruiners of it can remotely understand, being utterly lacking in these qualities themselves.
