Thirty years, but I never I quite fit in in America
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I was born in London, lived for a couple of years in Vienna, then Montreal, Ottawa for high school and university, then three decades in New York City, and recently Amsterdam. I loved New York but I never felt at home in America.
There were irrational elements such as the attitudes towards cars, guns, and religion, and a lot more minor weirdnesses like “sports and higher education” (college basketball alone is a billion dollar industry!) that I was never able to understand.
There was a fetishization of “freedom” (free speech, freedom from government regulation) over all other societal values from both of the two political parties. Even mentioning supporting a third party would anger Democrats and Republicans alike.
Very many seemingly educated Americans of both parties have a bizarrely patchwork knowledge of their own history where the nasty parts get mostly sanitized out. A young librarian once told me about her class in university: “They laughed at me, and then I suddenly realized that America had not won the Vietnam War.” She was a smart woman — she did figure it out when she got the information, but she had been deceived by her own teachers.
And of course the steadily increasing numbers of meetings with aggressively delusional conservatives. The first time I remember meeting one was around 2004 — a woman in a car I was riding in said, “Well, after 9/11 we either had to invade Iraq or build a wall at the southern border,” and I laughed — I thought she was joking! But she was only the first.
I never felt at home in America. I felt at home in New York City. It was a marvellous place — it was full of freaks, weirdos, artists and musicians whom I dearly love to this day — but the rest of America I never loved, and eventually I left it all, quite likely never to return.
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(See also this fascinating article: “What Armenians should know about life in America”.)
