The Foreign Exchange Program America Needed
This week, I found myself doing something I never would have predicted: scrolling through the social media dumpster fire formerly known as Twitter nodding along saying “you know, these Europeans have got a point.”
Strange times.
The World Cup has brought soccer fans from around the world to North America, and a lot of them aren’t content to spend a week taking selfies in Times Square or Hollywood. They’re renting cars and wandering off to see the rest of us. They’re finding small Southern college towns, county fairs, roadside diners, national parks, truck stops, and all the wonderfully odd little corners of America that most travel brochures forget to mention.
I’ve been following several of them. There’s Freddy, a German who somehow managed to tour Auburn’s campus at midnight, destroy his shoes floating the Chattahoochee, buy a new pair at a twenty-four-hour Walmart, and eat lunch at Buc-ee’s in the same day. Elsa, from Sweden, discovered biscuits and gravy, saw what she believed were mythical yellow school buses, and experienced a personal awakening to the American delicacy that is Ranch dressing. An Englishman named John started in Florida, had his mind blown at the Kennedy Space Center, drank his first Big Gulp during a thunderstorm, and is now making his way toward New Orleans, where he’ll almost certainly discover that America has more regional accents than he bargained for.
At first, I just thought their posts were entertaining. Then I realized I was looking forward to them as they were making me think a little deeper.
Sure, the inevitable (and amusing) anecdotes about culture shock are great. The portions are too big. The highways are too long. The pickup trucks are absurd. Someone is always amazed by how friendly complete strangers can be. But what really caught my attention was something else. These visitors were noticing things that, if I’m honest, most of us stopped seeing a long time ago.
I suppose that’s understandable. We experience our communities the same way we experience the drive to work. Eventually we know every turn so well that we stop looking out the window.
Someone arriving from four thousand miles away doesn’t have that problem. They see a country where you can drive for days without leaving it and still find different accents, different foods, different customs, and different ideas about what constitutes proper barbecue (and Buc-ee’s brisket has to be a contender). They see high school graduation parades, county fairs, Little League fields, church picnics, and neighborhoods where people still wave at passing cars.
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For the last several years, we’ve become very good at reminding ourselves of everything that’s wrong with America. Turn on the television, open social media, or spend five minutes in the comments section of almost any news article and you’ll find ample evidence that suggests the country is divided, permanently angry, and broken. Some of those criticisms are fair. Some are long overdue.
The problem isn’t that these issues don’t exist. They do. The problem is that if we’re not careful, our perspective becomes distorted. There’s an old saying that fish don’t know they’re wet. Living inside something every day makes it difficult to appreciate the environment around you. Sometimes it takes an outsider to point out what you’ve been taking for granted. Maybe it takes Freddy, or Elsa, or John.
None of these people are trying to settle our political arguments. They’re not pretending America has solved every problem. They’re simply telling us what they see. And what they see, more often than not, is a country that’s big, loud, occasionally ridiculous, and remarkably welcoming.
I’ve been thinking about that more than I expected.
Travel broadens horizons, or so we’re told, but these World Cup visitors have me wondering if attention matters just as much. Maybe you don’t have to cross an ocean to discover something worth appreciating. Maybe you just have to look at familiar things with fresh eyes.
America isn’t perfect. No country is. But it is an extraordinary place, stitched together by millions of ordinary people doing ordinary things that, viewed from the outside, turn out to be pretty remarkable.
I think that’s what our road-tripping Euro-friends have helped reframe for me.
Spend a little less time arguing about the country we imagine we live in and a little more time experiencing the one that’s actually around us. See your town the way a first-time visitor might. You may find that some of the things worth celebrating were there all along.
Jack
