I am a U.S. American who has pretty much come to the conclusion that to be a U.S. American, or rather, to accept the fact that you -are- a U.S. American, is to accept the shame and guilt that comes with it. The United States, of course, is probably one of the worst institutional, religious and culturally inane places on the map, but I'm not saying that its all bad.
What I am saying, however, that as a non-Tea Party, non-Christian, Non-political party-following-junky is that a lot of the United States' issues arise from actually a troubling and terribly deep insecurity about our identity as a people. We are a very young nation, started by the immigrants that were pretty much not wanted in their original countries, and when we came to the soil that is now the United States, we destroyed first the original cultures that were here (the Native Americans), followed by an outright retaliation of anything related to the Crown (American Revolutionary War), and then in-fighting between our own people over what this country "ought" to be (Civil War).... and after all of that, what we were left with was a broken identity that has never quite recovered. Now, before you bark at me that the United States has a culture, let me explain myself.
The term I am using to describe culture is "the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group", as taken from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The problem with the United States is that as a country, we don't have ancestral roots to an older culture except by those that were brought from abroad. And those cultures, whether they are Irish, African, Jewish, Chinese or Japanese, have all been persecuted at some point in the U.S., to the point that they have been utterly subdued (Slavery, Internment Camps). But every culture needs an identity, and when the country was struggling to make some sort of tie between so many people, only one thing seemed to ring true for everyone: money. The Industrial Revolution is when it really started, at least in my opinion.
This is where my trouble with the Capitalism argument comes in. I don't necessarily agree with the capitalistic model, however, I am also wondering what would really be left in "American" culture if you took away its capitalism. Capitalism IS American Culture, with the exception of a few groups that have specific culture (New York, New Jersey, The South, etc). The only other thing that U.S. Americans would have to define themselves if Capitalism was out of the picture is their red, white and blue patriotism, which, as of late, has also been bringing great shame to me.
Currently, I am dating a Canadian, and living in Japan on study abroad, and every day, a little more of me is depressed by the America that is depicted not just by the world (which is warranted, but still hurtful), but also its own citizens. We are not a country of "people", but a country of individuals who struggle daily to figure out how we fit into this contrived sense of culture.
To me, the only true bond U.S. Americans have is that to be a U.S. American, is to live the shame of being a U.S. American. Maybe I've just become disillusioned.
