The first thing you learn as an American living overseas is that the rest of the world doesn’t hate us the way we tend to suspect they do. They might think we’re a bit rough around the edges or that we have lousy taste in food, or that our movies are too schmaltzy and our beer is a bad joke, and they certainly don’t get why we as a society have decided health care is a privilege; but by and large they like us like that crazy cousin you wouldn’t want to live with but enjoyed hanging out with once a year. In a decade of mostly living overseas (on three continents, in both Anglophone and non-Anglophone countries), the positive reactions I’ve received outweigh the negative ones by ten to one at least.
They like us, but they also believe most of the stereotypes about us.
So I was reminded one morning back in May, on the train to work in Melbourne. Across the aisle, a little boy asked his mother why all police officers carry guns. “Not all of them do,” she told him. “Here they do, but in England they don’t. And in America, everybody has a gun.”
Having just moved to Melbourne from Singapore, I was used to people knowing I was foreign just by looking at me. It doesn’t work that way in Australia any more than it does in America: anyone, no matter hir ethnicity, could have been born and raised here, and anyone might be fresh off the plane from anywhere (as I was, by about three weeks). In any event, in response to that comment, I did something I probably shouldn’t have: I laughed and said, “That’s right, we all sleep with them under our pillows!”
When I recounted the incident on Facebook later that day, I got a lot of “likes”; but one friend – that one friend we all have who always picks a fight about everything, yet every now and then s/he has a legitimate point – called me out for undermining a parent’s authority in front of her child. Several months – and several mass shootings back home – later, I’m still on the fence about whether I was out of line or not. On the one hand, yes, I did show her up in front of her son; but on the other hand, just maybe I taught them both a lesson about stereotypes. (If it weren’t Americans and guns, how about Italians and the mafia, or South Africans and racists?) In any event, at the time, she showed no sign of taking offense. She simply corrected herself: “Well, not everybody, but a lot of people do, because they have a thing called the Second Amendment…” When they got off the train, I wished the little boy a good day, and she directed him to return the greeting.
For that reason, in spite of my friend’s condemnations on Facebook, I didn’t spend much time questioning the appropriateness of my having said anything. Until this week.
It was a stereotype, and one that Americans living overseas have to put up with constantly at that. Even Canadians tend to get antsy coming south of the border, I’ve noticed. A guy I know from Hamilton, Ontario, felt compelled to buy a gun himself when his job sent him to Phoenix for several months. (Any Canadians reading this are more than welcome to tell those who haven’t been to Hamilton about the irony in that!) People genuinely don’t believe that it’s possible to grow up in many parts of the USA and never see a gun except at shooting ranges and the like, or at least they’re very surprised when you tell them as much. And yet…
And yet, like all stereotypes, it exists in the first place for a reason.
With every new shooting, I find it harder and harder to bother trying to convince everyone that it’s not an everyday occurrence. I recall that while “we all sleep with our guns under our pillows” was intended to be sarcastic, my own grandfather did in fact do that. I think of all the times I’ve tried – and failed – to explain how the Senate gives Wyoming the same number of votes as California (my shorthand explanation for why there’s no such thing as gun control back home, by the way). I think of how anyone who was born when Columbine happened is now old enough to drive and in all that time, nothing has been done to stop it from happening again. I think of a gun nut I know back home who is absolutely opposed to any gun control whatsoever and is also a huge Beatles fan and doesn’t see the irony. There does come a point where I have to wonder if we deserve the ridicule we get over it all.
I’m just about at the point where I’m persuaded that we do. I don’t know if that’s going to do any good, but that’s beside the point. I can, at least, say most Australians I’ve met are sympathetic about the whole thing. This past weekend I had a bartending gig at an anniversary party, and a lot of the partygoers stopped to chat with me about whether we think this latest time might be the one that tips the scales. I could only say I hoped it would. That got a lot of sad concurring nods. (By the way, there are Aussies who would be right at home in today's GOP: at another party I worked at, a guy heard my accent and immediately asked what I thought of Ben Carson, and explained that his dad loved him.)
Years ago when we were still muddling through Dumbya’s reign of error, a guy I met at a bar in Amsterdam overheard me confessing that I wasn’t terribly proud of my country right then, and he told me one should never be ashamed of one dumb choice that some people back home made. I’ve kept that in mind ever since, and I truly am proud of my country. I just wish we weren’t quite so good at dumping all our problems out onto the couch of the world for everyone to see; but I think I like that better than the alternative. Still and all, I’ll be a lot more proud of my country when we do something about what could only be called our biggest problem at this point. I’m pretty sure our foreign friends will be, too!
Incidentally, the Australians are just as willing to acknowledge their own stereotypes as ours. A few weeks ago, I was out walking on a very windy day. A woman I didn’t know was walking towards me when the wind blew her skirt up. I looked away, as any gentleman would do, and after thanking me, she said, “You weren’t expecting this kind of wind when you moved here, were you?” As she couldn’t have heard my accent (because I hadn’t said anything), I asked how she knew I wasn’t from here.
Her response: “An Aussie bloke wouldn’t have looked away.”