Delshawn Anderson: That American Pride

“It’s called football, not soccer.”

I nodded to his comment, “Agreed. You do use your feet, don’t you?”

“Why do you call it soccer then?”

Shrugging, I looked over my companion’s shoulder for someone else to talk to, “I have no idea.”

I found her. “Where are you from?” she said.

“South Carolina—it’s in the south-east, near Atlanta.”

“Oh yeah? Cool.” She said grinning like a child with a brand-new toy, “My family went on holiday there. Want to hear my southern accent?”

“Sure.” I waited for her to finish. I had decided to keep this friend and whether or not she sounded anything like me was less than immaterial. “That was good.”

“Really? Cheers dude. Why don’t you talk like that?”

“I have no idea.” I pressed the circular button next to the doors of the elevator, “Let’s take the elevator; I’m sick of these stairs.”

“What…this? You mean the lift?”

“No,” I responded tersely, “I mean the elevator. You know, the thing that we ‘Americans’ invented?”

*     *    *

American pride is real. The funny thing is that I didn’t know I had it until it was being constantly challenged, pushed and prodded. I thought I was raised to love my country but I never imagined the degree of patriotism until I arrived in Winchester, England. To be fair, it didn’t just randomly occur whenever I came into contact with a native of Britain. No, it was almost a choice ready made for me. These people, these Britons, expected me to love my country. They expected me to know every inch of it, every blade of blue grass and every actor. They expected me to be able to explain the terrors that haunt America’s past and give an articulate stance either supporting or admonishing these events. They expected America’s history to be second nature to me, a sixth, seventh, or even an eighth sense. On all accounts, they expected me to deliver. On some accounts, I did so unflinchingly. On others, of course, I struggled. One instance in particular stands out to me the most.

My friend from Indiana, Jessie, and I had just gone shopping. Coming from town, there is this conveniently placed pathway—passing through a cemetery—that leads to the very front of the school. Jessie and I had two child sized bags swinging from each of our arms courtesy of the local Pri-Mark, i.e., a JC Penney’s with Wal-Mart prices. To save money, the two of us decided to grab food at the Terrace. All seated at a dark, wooden picnic table were our newly made friends. The four were fiddling with their hands, smoking, and taking turns eyeing the grey sky. They spotted us immediately thanks, in no small part, to our very bright, very American attire. We sat down and the conversation naturally progressed to more of the American versus British conversation I provided above. I was completely fine with it at this stage. We were new and it was only our third day with these new friends of ours, besides it was all a part of our novelty. We embraced it.

After having explored the differences between our prom and theirs, and deciding that ours was far superior, we naturally started talking about education. Jessie and I, almost a little too enthusiastically, started going on and on about GPAs, class ranks and my school’s famous graduation speech scandal. We worked in unison, inadvertently ignoring the slight frowns and raised eye-brows of our onlookers. Sian, after our tirade, shrugged and said something along the lines of, “That’s good,” and proceeded to take a smoke. Tash, the more enthused one of the group, spoke up, “Yeah,” she laughed, “We definitely don’t have that.”

Joe frowned, “Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Everyone is a number and the higher you are the better you are?” he shook his head. “I couldn’t do it.”

“What if you’re last?” Tash whispered with a smile.

“To each his own,” Andy interjected, ever the peace maker. “To be fair, if you had to do it, you would, wouldn’t you, Joe?”

“I’d move.” Joe said.

“It’s really not that bad,” I remember saying, indignantly. “It forces you to be better.”

“So what,” he said, “that doesn’t mean everyone performs better because of it. It just means that everyone is just stressed out.”

“Yes it does,” I insisted, “Competition makes people want to perform better. If there’s no goal, or no one to hate, what’s the point?”

He’d narrowed his eyes in disbelief, “You actually learn something because you want to, not just because you hate someone.”

I shrugged, “Oh, well.”

I didn’t talk to that guy for the rest of the night, in fact, until I could argue otherwise, I was determined to stay away from him. Was our school system truly terrible? Was it really just breeding hatred and discord among students? I didn’t use the word “hate” in a literal sense at the time, but I had heard people constantly say that about others when I was in high school. Our salutatorian and valedictorian always scowled and ignored each other when they would meet. The lower you were on the food chain the less it meant to you. No one past thirty cared or even knew about their rankings, but these were the people who never failed to smile at you. These were the people that had normal teenage “beef” that had nothing to do with how high their GPA was in comparison to Susie’s GPA.

I’d said that the American system brewed success, but what evidence could I recount without resulting to Google? What weapons did I have? I’d said all of these things about success and stress being a good motivator, but, in retrospect, did I actually hear myself? I was selling stress, marketing hatred and handing out pamphlets on how to be the best “American” you can be. Really, all I was doing was selling my country short. Even more than that, for the first time in my life, I was fervently trying to defend my country. I was indignant, right, and supposedly justified with the most infallible of reasoning: America rocks and if you don’t think so, you can kick rocks! Truthfully, for more reason than one, I was not that abrupt. I realized that to fully appreciate my experience I needed these people, and whatever opinions that followed. They challenged me, and they challenged what I thought was almost perfect—almost right. To fully appreciate my home, perhaps that was exactly what I needed.

Pride can quickly turn an observation into an insult if you let it. It gives and takes friends just as soon as you make them. It’s that dragon the town keeps to protect the gold. It builds you up and tears you down. Nothing can be more instinctive or primal, but, sometimes, it has its uses.

*     *     *

“Hey, Joe!” I nudged him in the arm, “Why does everyone wear so much black here? Is everyone just severely unhappy or is just the weather?”

He grinned, “It has to be a bit of both, doesn’t it?”

*     *     *

Delshawn Anderson is a English major at Lander University. She studied abroad at The University of Winchester in England during the fall semester of the sophomore year. She plans to graduate from Lander in May 2019, and after graduation she hopes to attend graduate school.