Mudita Journal

An American Abroad

October 3, 2006 · Filed under: Politics
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I’ve been enjoying reading Stephen Browne’s blog lately, and we’ve even been publishing some of his new stuff as articles at the Atlasphere, as well.

Reading his blog tonight, I was struck by this passage:

It’s interesting to me that the longer I live abroad, the more American I feel. More interesting is that Polish-American friends I have here, of the first native-born generation who grew up learning Polish at home in America, tell me that they feel the same way. They come here, like I did, even marry and settle here, as I did, and feel more and more American as time goes by. A Swedish woman once told me that it’s the opposite for them, the longer they live abroad, the less they feel like they belong in their own country.

Early in my stay in Poland I was sitting in a reading room (i.e. a place where for a small fee you could read foreign newspapers for as long as you liked, now sadly liquidated to make way for a huge bookstore). I was catching up on the Herald Trib when an elderly gentleman with a very thick accent came up to me and asked if I were American. I told him I was. “I am too.” He said proudly. “I live in America thirty years.”

Another time I was walking down a country lane in the west of Poland and walked by a farmhouse. Right in the middle of the barnyard was a tall flagpole and flying from it was the Stars and Stripes. I didn’t even have to ask what that meant. Obviously a Pole who had lived and worked in America long enough to become a citizen had retired to the old country — but he was proud to be an American and didn’t care who knew it.

In the midst of all of America’s fashionable anti-Americanism, I enjoy seeing someone write about true appreciation for America.

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