What does “Bimerican” mean?

*Trigger Warning*

There is the obvious answer…Or maybe it just seems obvious to me. I guess everything is a matter of perspective. The prefix bi could be attributed to lots of different things; bilingual, bipartisan, biracial. My bi is another kind of bi; I am bisexual. But in creating this blog I realized that the prefix bi holds a deeper meaning to me. Not just one of a sexual nature, but of a political one as well. Not just in the companions I seek, but in the passions and loyalties that I hold dear. There ARE two Americas; And I’m attracted to both of them.

For as long as I can remember, I have struggled with a strong sense of {instilled} patriotism and an almost overwhelming desire to hold someone, anyone, accountable for the injustices in life. I did the things that good Americans did; I watched Forrest Gump on the 4th of July during family barbecues; I went to baseball games and cheered for my home team; I joined JROTC every year of high school and I learned about the people who fought for my country; I even watched Fox News! But I also read, a lot, and when you read a lot you often find out things that you aren’t told at home around the dinner table or in movies. You find the things they gloss over in high school history classes, the American you didn’t learn about in elementary school songs. I don’t know if its the natural progression of all people, but I started to question everything.

A few key things happened in American society while I was growing up, and, along with a few key things in my life, I believe this set the stage for what was to become the ‘bimerican girl’ who stands before you today…figuratively speaking.

The first one I can really remember as far as the world stage goes, would be Columbine. And, in keeping with the narrative of this entry, not for the reason you might think.

I was in middle school when Columbine happened. I came home from school that afternoon with my friend Sarah and my mom was already in front of the TV. I remember that the house felt…unusual. She was sitting in the middle of the living room on an ottoman in her pajamas. She had tissues in her hand. I don’t remember if she looked up, I don’t even remember if she told me what was happening. I do remember that at 12 years old, I sat down next to her and watched the live coverage of children falling out of windows with gunshot wounds, people running for their lives. I remember feeling scared for them, but also feeling that it was almost my patriotic duty to continue to watch the live footage. There wasn’t much I could do from so far away, but at least I could do this, I had to do this. I went back to my room, after maybe an hour or so, to my also 12 year old best friend who could not figure out why I was so interested, why I had left her alone like that. She mocked me a bit then went home and I sat in the living room for the rest of the evening with my mom, watching the story unfold.

It was relatively early on in the recent history of 24 hour news and I was hooked. Caught up in the emotion of it all, caught up in the footage, caught up in the fact that I was just like those kids. It also hit home pretty fast that I wasn’t like everyone else and it was time to decide what parts of myself I was going to expose to the world and which parts I would hide away. I wasn’t like the kids my age who didn’t care about world events, I wasn’t like the kids my age who accepted whatever answer their parents or their church had given them. I didn’t have those answers, I usually needed to seek them out on my own. This pushed me to continue to ask questions, probe for better understanding.

When high school started, a lot of things changed for me. My friends changed, my tastes changed. I traded in my “American Girl” dolls & Dave Matthews Band concerts for Pennywise mosh pits & purple hair dye. I don’t know if I pretended not to care or if drink & drugs did that for me but I stopped asking questions, I stopped seeking new information, stopped learning. It was during this time in my life I survived a pretty violent sexual assault and an attempted suicide. Those are obviously pretty heavy statements and are topics for another time, but they lead up to another key point in my life and the lives of every single American who was alive on September 11th 2001.

When the first plane hit I was in school, JROTC in fact. We weren’t actually told until the second plane hit. No one really knew that it was anything other than a horrible accident until that second plane hit. I remember it was a half day in school, or a planning day, because we were already watching a movie. The teacher in JROTC was an incredibly intense, retired colonel in the USMC & was also the coach of the football team (think drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket). He came out of his office and turned the TV off. He looked at us with tears in his eyes and explained what had happened, that it was believed to be an attack on America. He refused to turn on the live coverage of it, said it was disrespectful, but our the live news feed played through every other classroom in the school for the rest of the day.

I remember going home to a familiar scene; mom in a dark room, crying with tissues, watching news coverage. This time though, I’m a teenager, we’re living together in a duplex after she left my dad, our relationship is strained from both of us using drugs. We watch the coverage in separate rooms. I am still numb from being raped just weeks earlier. No one knows. I don’t feel I can trust anyone. I sink my emotions, and lack of emotions, into the footage of the planes hitting, the footage of people jumping, the footage of survivors. I lay on the couch for two weeks. I went to school numb, I came home numb, and I laid on the couch, watching the news. All day and all night for two weeks. It was mesmerizing at a time that I guess I needed mesmerizing; Almost a focused meditation. No one knew about the rape, but this, this I could cry about. This was a time in America when it was seemingly normal to go up to a stranger and ask for a hug, cry with them for a moment. There was even something external to be angry at, a shared longing for someone to be held accountable. As someone who was essentially still a child at this point, I could lose myself further into this moment, pour my fears and desperation into the emotional turmoil that the entire country was feeling. Looking back in this moment, I think this must have had a huge impact on the way that I was able to handle such a horrific thing happening to me.

As most teenagers did at the time, I moved on from 9/11 pretty quickly. My mom got me into some therapy and I was able to talk to the therapist about what had happened to me. It helped more than I could have ever hoped and I was able to move on in my life. I still had my struggles, but I had a pretty standard high school experience. Fortunately, there was a librarian at my high school who took an interest in me and inspired me to start reading Dystopian & political novels. This urged me to keep asking questions. Unfortunately, I wasn’t focused on long term goals in the way that I should have been and didn’t work towards going to college. Instead of saving money, furthering my education, I moved out with my on/off boyfriend and began what would become a long series of customer service jobs.

One day, when I had stayed home sick from work, I watched an independent documentary called Loose Change alleging that 9/11 was an inside job, that the people who orchestrated it were still in power and they had made a ton of money doing it. I was floored. How could this have happened? I had to tell someone, I had to tell everyone. That sense I had when I was younger that I needed to hold someone accountable was overwhelming me again and I had to do something about it. I had always questioned my surroundings, held suspect the things that were told to me, but this felt different. This seemed like undeniable proof. There were so many questions surrounding one specific event, even if one could be answered, there were so many glaring inconsistencies that could not be explained. My boyfriend came home that day from work and I had him watch the entire thing with me again. It was determined that night that we had to spread the word about this.

The next year or so was pretty hard. We lost a lot of friends and my mom stopped talking to me for a while. “9/11 is an inside job” wasn’t exactly the rallying cry of 2004. We were still in the midst of the Iraq war and America overall was still very much of the mindset “either you’re with us or you’re with the enemy.” Upon realizing that my opinions were not only ostracized, but possibly dangerous, I started to distance myself from old friends and family.

For the most part, I lived the standard early 20’s live; lots of parties, lots of weed, lots of online gaming, lots of junk food. But soon my tastes started to change again. This time I was trading punk rock for underground political hip hop, trading regularly scheduled programming for 8 hour long lectures on the Illuminati. I attended protests, signed petitions, immersed myself in alternative concepts. I became increasingly paranoid, however, and longed to be able to cut myself off from society, live off my land, go off the grid. It seemed as though, again, I could trust nothing and no one, everything was suspect.

This felt different though; Not the same questioning nature I had as a child. Gone was the time when an event or situation gave me pause and caused me take a look around. This felt antagonistic, but not honest. It seemed that a lot of the movement I was following was encouraging me to turn off “mainstream media” and listen only to them. They hammered at statements like “Do your research!” but provided very little, if any, source material for their own articles & stories. The “questioning nature” of the surroundings I found myself in now were aggressively accusatory, but often turned out to be untrue.

I don’t remember the first time I read the term “Tea Party” but I do remember the first time I heard someone at a protest blame something on “The Jews”. It was pretty obvious when you looked behind the curtain that the people leading a lot of these “movements” were the same brand that they pretended to fight against. It was quickly becoming apparent to me that I was not in the right place. With this movement, maybe with my life overall. I needed to cast a wider net to find the truth. It certainly didn’t reside with people who were convinced that Jews controlled the media and that the founding fathers would require prayer in school. I don’t know if the Tea Party hijacked our movement or we hijacked theirs, but this was something that I did not recognize. The things I was hearing, the things I was reading, didn’t make sense to me anymore.

They say you should kill your heroes; I assassinated mine from a grassy knoll.

I quickly pushed away from the “truther” movement (now turned Tea Party movement) and promised myself that I would never be led astray by easy falsehoods again.

I broke up with the long time boyfriend who had “grown up” with me during this conspiracy laden, paranoid time in my life. He wasn’t letting go of the old movements so easily, still clinging to that misguided paranoia.

My new life consisted of a loving man who was anything but “underground”. He was a gamer who smoked weed and listened to Wiz Khalifa. He seemed to find my love of conspiracy theories cute and my anger towards authority endearing but he didn’t adhere to my beliefs as they were. He went organic with me and saw the benefit of healthy eating but mostly he was humoring me when I wanted to watch documentaries about GMOs and Monsanto. Sure, he was a libertarian and we had late night debates about the big questions in the world; he helped to shape a lot of the current beliefs I hold. But our life together was more about gaming than it was about politics. Our time was spent smoking & making love instead of planning our survival strategy & studying army field manuals. As our relationship evolved, my tastes had changed again. I traded Immortal Technique and protest signs for Lil Wayne and comic books. I immersed myself in my nerdy side. I embraced my love of happier things and started to enjoy life more than I ever had before. I was happy for the first time in my entire life and I really didn’t want to think about anything outside myself, for fear I might lose that feeling.

Around the time I turned 25 years old, though, I had a bit of a nervous breakdown. I got really paranoid again, not about the government this time, but about simple external factors that I couldn’t rationalize. I went to a doctor and was diagnosed with PTSD. My boyfriend was amazingly supportive, he worked while I stayed home and started going to therapy again.

In the summer of 2011, I created a Twitter account and stumbled across the live stream of a protest happening in New York City. It was a group of mostly young people calling out the greed and corruption on Wall Street. By the time my boyfriend got home from work that day, the protesters were being maced and beaten by police. This time, he came home to a sight that could have been taken right out of my own childhood. I was on the couch, crying with tissues in hand. I explained what was happening to him and he was honestly a bit annoyed. He had just gotten home from an extremely hard day at work to find his girlfriend crying on the sofa, still in her pajamas at 5pm. Once he settled in for the evening and realized the scope of what was happening, the injustices that we were witness to, he was just as drawn as I was.

We spent weeks watching the live coverage. Mainstream media footage on one screen, live streaming activists on our computers. We questioned everything we saw and encouraged others to do the same. I was elated. This questioning nature didn’t feel aggressive, it didn’t feel coerced, it felt honest. Honest in a way that I’d never really experienced.

We were live tweeting a revolution, and the best part was that we were doing it together.

The revolution didn’t happen though. The sincerity I sensed was burdened by disorganization and the movement made stagnant with convoluted requests. It seemed that people forgot the point of why they were occupying in the first place. Everyone had their own rallying cry, their own battle to fight. There was no unifying purpose and after a while, nothing to inspire the tired masses. Things died down, people went home. Towards the end I noticed the familiar whispering of protests past, the protests I had walked away from. It was apparent that the Tea Party had taken hold on the ground in New York and it was time to walk away from what was started in Zuccotti Park.

Things in my life continued on as they always had but I was bitter over what was lost with Occupy. I distanced myself from, well everything to do with current events. I didn’t watch alternative news, I didn’t watch mainstream news, I didn’t read the newspaper. My mistrust had become rooted so deeply that I stopped seeking new information all together for fear that I could never confirm it enough to rid myself of skepticism. (Only later would I realize this to actually be a positive thing, as it would help guide me on my path to Atheism. Again though, a topic for another time.)

Fast forward to our current situation, enter the senator from Vermont. This guy. If you’ve made it this far, I don’t think that I really need to explain my attraction to him as a politician or a leader. I will highlight that my boyfriend, the same mainstream loving, weed smoking guy from before, was the first person I ever heard utter the man’s name and he would not let up until I gave Bernie Sanders the proper attention. I regret to admit, though, that because of my past experiences, I was not as present as I should have been, in this political season. These past few months have shown me that I need to throw myself back in the game again, this time for the long haul.

I’m extremely excited but to be honest, I’m also terrified. I’ll be 30 when we choose the next President of the United States and I am certain we will never have a chance like this again. Someone like Bernie Sanders only comes around once in a lifetime. We cannot lose this opportunity. How many pictures of politicians do we have on empty senate floors, arguing against sending our children to war, fighting for LGBT rights decades before anyone thought it important, doing everything in his power to shed light on the corruption of wall street ahead of the financial collapse? The senate seats are empty because most of the asshats we vote to represent us don’t even show up to work. Not only does Bernie Show up, he consistently votes with his long held, and outspoken, beliefs. He’s a true example of what it means to be an American and he makes me proud of my country.

And that, if you can believe it, brings me ALL the way back to my original question.

What does “bimerican” mean?

In this blog you’ve read about a lot of really negative things in my life. I didn’t really focus too much on the “normal times”. What I’ve laid out here spans 20+ years. I don’t talk about all the camping trips and family events during that time, or that I still cry when I hear the national anthem. I don’t talk about working in a mall, breaking my ankle or that time one of my poems was published. I don’t mention the friends I have in the military or who went to war. There were plenty of times during these periods in my life where I was a completely happy, Walmart shopping, blockbuster seeing, red white & blue blooded American. There are times in my life when I am very proud to be an American and times when I’m not. I love my country, but I hate what it’s become. Did it become that way since I’ve been a free-thinking person? Probably not. But I feel like I’ve run the range of political emotions in America and I can tell you, we’re only getting started in this “Political Revolution”.

I saw John Kerry at a political rally when he was running back in 2004, that was the first election in which I could vote. I’ve never felt more like an American in my entire life. I went to the Bernie Sanders rally in Tampa a few weeks ago and I have to tell you, it easily topped my earlier political experiences.

I may question her at every turn, but I would never trade being an American for anything. I’m finding that I can be proud of where I’m from while still being ashamed of the current state of things. The concept of “two conflicting beliefs” isn’t always what it seems. We are a strong, inspiring nation but we’re not being inspiring right now. We must ensure that our representatives actually represent us.

I call myself “bimerican” because I’m a protester that would never let the American flag touch the ground. I call myself a “bimerican” because I would never bow to a dictator, no matter how benevolent or patriotic they may seem, instead I continue to vote and hope and vote and hope. I call myself a “bimerican” because no matter how far thing country strays from it’s original intentions, I believe we always have the power to steer her right again and I intend on sticking around to help do just that.

I’m not just bisexual, I’m also bimerican.