I'm proud to be American

On remembering who we really are

I felt most proud to be American not here in the United States, but in Kosovo.

There, Old Glory soars over nearly every public building, major intersection, and shopping complex, nearly eclipsing the number of Kosovar flags. Boulevards named after American presidents like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush cut through major cities, and memorials erected for fallen American and NATO soldiers dot the countryside.

In Prizren, the historical capital of the country, a Kosovar insisted on taking my friend and me out to coffee. He described how Kosovo feels indebted to America for “saving its people from genocide.”

Kosovo is a contested state, recognized by around 110 countries but claimed by Serbia to be an autonomous province. During the 1990s, it was one of the hotbeds of the Yugoslav Wars, where the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo began agitating for independence from the Serbian-dominated federal government. The Yugoslavian Army brutally retaliated, engaging in a campaign of ethnic cleansing and gendercide. The Račak massacre, where 45 civilians were slaughtered by Serbian police units, finally gave President Bill Clinton the political capital necessary to force intervention. In March 1999, NATO forces began the bombing campaign that would end the conflict.

After taking a class on memory politics, I wanted to spend my final Robertson summer in the Balkans, exploring nationalism and reconciliation. Partly, because my final project was on NATO’s intervention in Yugoslavia. But, mostly, because I wanted to understand what it means to be so proud of your country that you’d die for it. And how to be proud of your country even when it has been the villain in another’s story.

As part of the post-9/11 generation, I’ve never known American intervention to have successfully birthed a nation. I think shamefully of the flattened villages in Iraq, of the translators abandoned in Afghanistan. Of the American weapons still hammering war zones today. Bring our boys home, and leave these poor people alone, I sometimes want to shout. I can’t trust us to get this right.

Yet in Prizren, I was told that here, America has done an unequivocal good. We haven’t always stepped up when we should have or sat back when we needed to, but here, we protected people. There’s a generation of Klintons and Madeleines, now adults barely older than I am, because we made the right choice.

As hawkish or realistic as I might persuade myself I am, Kosovo reminded me that there is a moral form of politics that asks: can I live with myself, if I make this decision? If I cut this program, if I pass this budget, if I condemn these people?

The first six months of the Trump administration made me deeply wrestle with my patriotism. I struggled with how to trust an imperfect government that I felt was un-American abroad as we abandoned Ukraine, and at home, as we tore apart families. But, the America of today is still the country that saved Kosovo, that birthed the Greatest Generation, that signed the Declaration of Independence.

We are a country that has sinned and sinned and sinned so many times over again, but we are also a country that does not stop trying to be good. Even when good is hard to define and even harder to be.

To give up, and put just certain Americans first, is not who we are.

I’m still proud to be American, because it is the American instinct — a fealty to life, liberty, and happiness everywhere — that has always made us exceptional. This Fourth of July, I celebrated the America that we have sometimes been, and the America that we could be again.

---

Thank you for reading, especially after my writing hiatus. I’m once again on a Robertson Summer (my final one!), and excited to share about my adventures and musings. Stay tuned.