Which America do you live in?

I live in a very white town. Blacks make up 5% of my neighborhood. Today someone invited me to a town fair and while I'm very much a non-fair-going city gal, I decided to take in some of this very white town's festivities. I arrived in time to see a number of fire brigades floating down the street where a parade was taking place. Blasting from the speakers was the song "Proud to be an American," and as I rattled my brain to figure out where I had heard the song before (oh, yeah, 9/11, American Idol?), I looked around to see the proud faces of this America in which I will have to live for the next 4-5 years. The on-lookers, my neighbors that I had never seen, who hardly even realized I was standing there, were primarily white. I felt like I was at a redneck Republican convention. All around me were long beards, flush red cheeks, construction boots and Birkenstocks, and an all too familiar obnoxious smell of Marlboros all around. (Where's Derrick the WHADAFXUP guy when you need him? ).There is a grey cloud over this town and I swear it's thanks to cigarettes. But I digress. The only diversity I saw in my limited line of vision was in the colors red, white, and blue and some orange that the attendees and the participants of this parade wore. No sign of diversity in this town. Then I wondered why the heck someone would invite me to this kind of function. I felt like a stranger in a world that seemed all too familiar to everyone else who was there. They were clapping and cheering and jumping to catch the candy that the paraders threw out and all I could think about was how vastly different this America is from the America I have known for 13 years. Then suddenly, black man rode by on his makeshift float. He is running for town judge. I thought "Oh maybe it isn't so white after all!" But I was standing within earshot of a couple in their late sixties. The woman exlaimed in a most condescending and surprised tone "town judge?" as if to say "how dare he! Does he not see what town this is? Apparently not. This is America!

People here seemed to have no care in the world. I saw some soldiers walk by and I immediately thought of the soldiers in Iraq. The 18 year olds who had no choice but to enlist in the army after high school, the fathers who have never seen their newborn daughter or son because they were deployed too soon, the mothers who had to walk away from their children to serve...I thought of them. And then my attention was called back to the scene. It was time for the bed and bath tub race. People decorated beds and bath tubs and dragged them down the street as a form of entertainment. This is when I zoomed out again because I couldn't help but think of the victims of Katrina who were still displaced. Those who still have no bed nor a decent bath in which to take a shower. This is America...the America I live in. Then it was time for the wave. A young girl volunteered to run along the side of the street as the "wave director." This was all new to me; I'd never seen it. The young girl took her white-socked feet out of her Adidas slippers and the commentator said "your mom is going to kill you for running in those socks." She shrugged as if to say "so what, I have plenty more where this comes from." And again, I had an out of body experience--I started thinking of the many children who hide their feet when they change their shoes in order to hide the holes in their socks. But she shrugged. She took it for granted. This is America...the America in which I reside. It's definitely a different world from my own. And now I know why I was invited to the fair. The people who teach me and other teachers in my program are from this world. They would never understand what I mean when I speak on behalf of the child who does not have the things they have because to them being middle class, Republican, and monolithic is American. This is the America that controls my future...and I will probably never understand it or live in that America but I'm glad I got to see the other side. Am I proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free? I have to think about that for a while but first, I need to understand what the word free means because with what I saw today, freedom comes at the expense of the other America; the one in which I've lived and worked for 13 years. But I definitely won't forget the men and women who died and gave that right to me. But I doubt Lee Greenwood was talking about the same men and women that gave my rights to me. Not to take anything away from the troops. I am the only sister of a soldier. But let's talk about the two Americas and the two kinds of people who gave their lives for freedom because someone seems to have forgotten 1619 and before...that's my two cents.