I was five years old on July 4, 1976.

The American Bicentennial was a very big deal.  My whole world turned red, white, and blue.  The stars and stripes were everywhere.  The United States of America was 200 years old, and you couldn’t be conscious and miss that fact.

That sounds like a long time—hell, the country just turned 234, for that matter—but it really isn’t.  Our culture is, in a global context, quite young.

I’ve never cared to have any sort of national identity except American.  I’m neither European-American, nor British-American, nor Caucasian-American, nor anything else but American.  It makes me really sad that so many want to qualify their national identities with hyphens (and, too often, out-and-out antipathy toward the American half of the expression).  I’ll go so far as to say I think it’s a mistake.

When you consider the breadth of our “meltees,” we’re really the only true melting pot there is.  I wouldn’t have it any other way.  I love that so many people from so many different places want to come here.  I love that they (legally) do.  I love that they add their cultural traditions when they do.

“How great to be American, and something else as well.”

Indeed.

I don’t have any illusions about how I think it should go when new Americans arrive.  Bring whatever you like with you, and continue to do it (within the bounds of the laws, which you’ll almost certainly find are more permissive than wherever you came from).  But in my view, you’re adding it to the grand American mosaic, not keeping it intact and separate.  It’s its own thing where you came from.  Here, it becomes American by definition.

I know that’s a controversial view, and I really hate that. I think it’s become so in my lifetime.  When did that happen?  When did we collectively start staring at the ground and mumbling “I’m an American,” rather than shouting it from the mountaintops?