incidentally

I have some news for you, something that's come on hard and fast and taken me by surprise. But I want to be up front about it despite how some of you may react.

I have developed a passionate, and possibly fierce, pride in America.

It is not a blind pride, or a my-country-right-or-wrong pride, and it is certainly not a pride in our current administration. It does not involve assumptions that we are historically benign or currently wise. It harbors no illusions about the economic and social injustices that countless Americans and would-be Americans face daily.

However.

I am sitting in a bus winding its way through Croatia, a country that has had four distinct periods in the past 55 years. One was as a puppet state of a fascist reich, during which 17,000 Jews and at least as many others were murdered at Jasenovac. Two was a communist dictatorship, when dissenters dissappeared and everyone else waited on line for bread. Three was a war that violently ripped one country into five more "ethnically pure" countries, levelling cities, erasing towns, and displacing millions.

And now here is four, democracy revelling in capitalism, with McDonalds and Friends. And it makes me a little sad but I can't by any measure call it worse.

And this week alone I met a Serb girl who said that if she went to Albania they would kill her, and I saw a photo exhibit of 6-year-old Israeli boys dressed as soldiers and 6-year-old Palestinian boys throwing stones, and I talked to a Polish woman who had never met a black man but felt they were untrustworthy.

And so I am proud of America, for the way we are trying to make this work. I am thankful for the myriad ways we are trying, with varying degrees of grace and diligence, to live together peacefully and prosperously. That, the Balkans have taught me, is no small feat.