Are you a Real AmericanTM?

Unless you're a citizen of another country and only visiting, I'm sure you think you are. I'm just as sure that no matter who you are and what opinions you hold, there is a fairly substantial number of people who would tell you that you're not a real American at all. Not really, not by their standards.

But whose standards should count? ...that's a rhetorical question, don't try to answer it or you'll just get vertigo.

We've gone through divisive times in our nation's history (think McCarthyism, or the 1960s), but not since 1865 have so many people regarded around half of their country's citizens as traitors, insurgents, enemies of the people, terrorists, threats to everything we stand for and dedicated to ending democracy as we know it. You'll look long and hard to find anyone--including anyone in Winchendon--who doesn't feel this way. The problem is...everyone you talk to will feel this way about a completely different sub-set of other American citizens.

Indeed, if the requirement for being "a real American" was the agreement of at least 75 percent of the adult population that you qualify as such, there wouldn't be a single "real American" on United States soil, coast to coast.

The weird thing is, if we eliminate political views, Americans haven't changed a whole lot from who we've always been. If we get out of our Facebook echo chambers and turn off Fox News, MSNBC, and the incendiary podcasts, radio shows and YouTube channels we waste so much time on...what, about our neighbors, has actually changed?

Our neighbors are still getting up every day, getting breakfast, taking care of their kids, running errands, going to work. They're still cleaning their kitchens, mowing their lawns, working in their gardens, sitting outside in nice weather. They're still texting and calling their friends. They're adopting homeless animals and getting ready for winter. They're decorating for Halloween. They're checking out sales up at Wal*Mart, or on Amazon for Prime Day. They're worrying about money. They're grumbling on Facebook.

We're all worn down by the pandemic, and the economic impact it's had on many of us who are healthy, but unemployed or furloughed from jobs, or struggling to keep small businesses afloat.

But are we seriously different from the way we used to be?

Americans have always had a distinctive national character, a unique group personality that Europeans and Asians have recognized for two centuries. Restless, ambitious, fervently emotional, with extremely high expectations, tending to believe we can do anything, more gullible than cynical, more "spiritual" than "religious" (constantly spinning off sects and cults and new denominations at the drop of a hat), impulsive and violent, somewhat messianic (America saves the world!)...we think we're so different and diverse, but to people in other countries, we're very much the same. Even our marginalized communities are distinctively American. Black Americans are not like Black Britishers; LGBTQ Americans have a different outlook from those in Scandinavia, or Australia.

Why is it so hard to see how alike we really are, and build on that? We seem to allow unreality, the second-hand images presented to us on TV and social media, to influence, even override, the evidence of our own experience and common sense.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American author who wrote the novels House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter. He was fascinated with Puritan New England of the 1600s and how communities scapegoated and demonized individuals. In Hawthorne's short story "Young Goodman Brown," the main character is a naive young Puritan man who dreams, or hallucinates, seeing all his neighbors at a witches' meeting. From that day on, his view of the townsfolk is tinged with horror; he never trusts or likes them again. Yet the townsfolk had not changed at all. It was only Goodman Brown's perception of them that was different.

In 1995, I went to an unusual "art house" movie, filmed in black and white, called Dead Man. I took the T into Kendall Square to see it, in the middle of a bright sunny, beautiful afternoon. When I left the theatre, everything I saw seemed "off," too brightly colored, imbued with mysterious significance--like I was on a psychedelic drug. Two hours of watching a single intense film did that. It took a while for the effect to wear off.

What if everything you're watching on YouTube and Facebook and cable news, for hours every day, is affecting you like that--and you don't even realize it? There's an election coming up. Everyone on the ballot wants to win, and all their supporters want them to win. To accomplish that, they're all trying to scare you. They're all trying to mess with your head.

What if you just turn off all that manipulative messaging, go out and talk with your neighbors (wearing your face mask and staying socially distanced, of course!), and start living in the real world?

There's far more to truth and reality than can possibly fit onto a screen, after all. Just open up your mind, and the sky's the limit.

Inanna Arthen