I love you England and I love the U.S. too
I was born in England and now I live in the US., they’re both countries that I care for passionately, and for so many different reasons. I’ve always loved the geography and the land here, and how it speaks to me. Yes from sea to shining sea there is nothing like the North American continent, and I marvel every day at its beauty and its majesty.
I’m happy to have married a Yank and raised two strong-minded, independent daughters here. When I first came to California it was in the seventies, and women were beginning to raise their heads and emerge as a strong vital part of the economic and political landscape. In England the country of my birth, women hadn’t yet left the gate, and traditional marriage, as Rebecca Traister so aptly recounts in her book All the Single Ladies, was the dead end that waited for all of us. I’m so grateful to this new country of my own choice, which has opened so many doors that would have otherwise been closed to me.
Now, as I watch the turmoil created by Brexit, and read the angry and confused emails from my friends and relatives, I feel a great sense of deep sadness and fear for my mother country.
Even more disturbing than the bleak economic circumstances that will face that country in the future, including the potential break up of the United Kingdom itself, I’m sickened by the uptic in hate crimes that has risen 57 percent in the aftermath of the EU referendum vote. It has in fact led me to reflect on why I so love this country. It’s because of the diversity of culture that makes us remarkable. We haven’t done a perfect job of integration, but we should be proud of what we’ve only just started, and not nearly finished.
That’s why we simply can’t let someone like Donald Trump divide and conquer us. We must have political leaders who celebrate our diversity, welcome it and see it as a strength. Because that’s what makes the US such a strong, vibrant and exciting place to be. We must hold together at the center because Britain couldn’t and hasn’t. We must not let the language of hate, racism, sexism and xenophobia infiltrate what we are just beginning to understand, as in Black Lives Matter, and keep building our commonality here.
We are and always have been a country of immigrants, and though I might wish with all my heart we hadn’t almost wiped out our indigenous brothers and sisters in the process of our colonization, or built a great deal of our economic strength on the backs of slaves, I truly believe that what we can do now, is continue to respect this particular piece of earth on which we find ourselves, and create a nation that is free of sexism, racism and xenophobia.
That’s why we must choose our next President with great care, even if we have to vote closer to the center than we would all like. With a strong trunk we can go out as far as we want on any branch it supports, one green leaf among many, big and small, dark and light, and then reach for the sky.
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