Revisiting America
The transformation of my patriotism and the death
of my civic religion
By Amy Jonason
When I left Grand Rapids, Michigan, to study abroad in Thailand for a semester, I was happy to have the chance to learn about another place while being a part of it. It was a unique opportunity for a student like me, who had never set foot outside of continental North America. People told me that being abroad would make me see the United States differently.
While I accepted their wisdom, I also stepped off the plane confident that my last two-and-a-half years of Christian liberal arts education had prepared me well for resisting culture shock. I had studied sociology and inequality and raised awareness about justice issues with a student group on campus. I had voted for Kerry when 88 percent of my campus chose Bush. I already knew that the war in Iraq was a mistake and that suburban strip malls were stealing our collective soul. But, even though I thought my view of the United States was accurate, my study abroad experience completely transformed the way I saw my country.
At first glance, Thailand confirmed what I thought I knew. “You know George Bush?” my host father asked one day in the car. “He wants to kill Muslims!” I decided to attribute this sweeping generalization to his broken English, and mitigated his statement with, “Yeah, it’s not such a great situation….”
Accustomed to a government whose democratic face is often a façade upholding privilege and corruption, the Thais I met challenged even my politically liberal understanding of the mixed motives behind our government’s foreign policy.
Thailand was also my introduction to a justice issue of great consequence: the tension between modern and traditional ways of life. In neighboring Burma (Myanmar), this tension has an ethnic overtone that is perpetuating genocide under the blind eye of the international community. A long period of revolution ended with the State Peace and Development Council seizing control of the country. Their years in power have brought neither peace nor development; for decades now, members of traditionally rural hill tribes who have lived in the mountains for generations have been conscripted for forced labor, murdered, raped, and run out of their villages.
Modernization alone cannot be blamed for this disgrace; however, as the Unocal scandal indicates, it has been a deceitful savior. The BBC documented that this California-based oil company was sued by Burmese villagers in the late 1990s for allegedly allowing the Burmese army to rape villagers and conscript forced labor while guarding an oil pipeline that Unocal was building. Unocal settled with the villagers in 2005.
Thailand has also perpetuated injustice for the sake of modern pursuits. I was enraged when I first learned that the government had adopted a development plan that forces rural villagers out of newly designated “national parks.” We visited a village outside of Chiang Mai that refused to relocate and, as a consequence, has had its electricity cut off. Its members are on a campaign to win the right to stay on their land and are also trying to prevent the latest “development” project—a combination elephant zoo/resort hotel/flower garden/amusement park/cable car line that is already being built inside the national park boundaries. By the government. For the sake of tourist dollars. No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus…because it is a very broken world.
In the midst of my fits of righteous anger, a subtle realization set in, one that has sent me to my knees and humbled me more than ever. It started with our professor sharing an anecdote about the situation of Thailand’s national parks. A former student had been carrying on one day about the injustice of forcing the villages to relocate when a villager interrupted him and said, “You mean there were never people living in your national parks?”
Slowly, I came to consider the fuzzier aspects of U.S. history, the ones whitewashed by my high school textbooks, the ones we had touched on but rushed through in favor of Columbus Day and Thanksgiving. Our purple mountains majesty had never before been presented to me as the spoils of genocide and war. Indeed, I had never fully grasped the extent to which injustice cracks the very foundation of America.
What are we supposed to do? We “Americans” are a transplanted people—rootless and adolescent—yet we grow as if we thought we could be Isaiah’s oaks of righteousness. Thai people taught me that the ways of those who lived on the land before us continue to have meaning and consequence. They should not be so easily discarded.
Something fundamental in my attitude toward my country changed as a result of my experiences in Thailand. For me, the great international playing field was leveled when I honestly owned up to our corporate transgressions. That confession brought pain but healing too.
Somehow, I returned to the United States with a more honest appreciation for baseball games, bluegrass music, and big sky country because I also recognized the fallacy of American pride. I appreciate democracy more than ever, but I also understand that no one nation can lay claim to its truth. I have become a stronger advocate of grassroots transformation, believing that the people who will be the most affected by development are the ones who should drive it. And I have become deeply skeptical of the notion that the field of development can write universal prescriptions for the prosperity of the world’s many communities.
And since I am a person of faith, my experience in Thailand acted as a double-edged sword. It sliced into the place where my Christian beliefs had become intertwined with the lingering assumption that Americans were just better Christians than the rest—and liberal Americans doubly so—and it excised that misconception with a few fatal cuts. What remains now is a more humble realization that in terms of both its people and its politics, the United States has a long way to go if it is to be a beacon of equality and benevolence for foreign nations; and it may well benefit the Christian church to mobilize outside the political realm to work for these goals on its own terms. Thanks to my semester in Thailand, in my future career, I hope to continue to work for justice with a deeper historical understanding of what that means for our society. And until it is accomplished, I will build my home on a very different foundation.
Amy Jonason studied in Thailand with the International Sustainable Development Studies Institute (www.isdsi.org). She graduated in May 2008 from Calvin College with an interdisciplinary major in international development studies and sociology.