I am a Venezuelan citizen by
birth and, since 2011, also a U.S. naturalized citizen. Having lived in the
U.S., off and on, for some 20 years of my long life, I decided to emigrate to
the U.S. in 2003, as the situation in Venezuela became intolerable for a person
who loves freedom, democracy and a civilized quality of life. I wanted to be a
good citizen and the U.S. looked like my best choice. I was fortunate to be accepted
as a resident, first, and eventually as a new citizen of this great country. I
graduated in the 1950s as a geologist at the University of Tulsa and count that
stay as one of the happiest periods of my life. I returned many times to the
U.S. and did work here during the 1960’s and 1980’s. Every time I lived here I
felt very much at home. I felt De Tocqueville was very right when he spoke with
admiration of those qualities of Americans that made possible the great
progress of the nation. He referred to them as the habits of the heart: civic responsibility, hard work, social solidarity,
family life, religious convictions and common sense.
When I came here, in 2003, I
noticed changes in American society that were not for the better. The country
did not have that shining quality that I remembered, but this did not bother me
too much because, newly arrived from Venezuela, the contrast between the two
societies was great in favor of life in America. I started to live my American
dream, particularly in the areas related to good citizenship such as being able
to pay taxes in a simple manner, without
infinite complications (yes, there can be joy in doing this), paying utility
bills online, doing volunteer work, living in a polite environment, saying
“have a nice day” and meaning it, stopping at red lights, not stepping on the
grass, big and small things that are very difficult to do in the Venezuela of
the XXI century, due to the explosion of social resentment and hatred that the
government has generated in the country. I reveled in being a good citizen. I
also saw that, with modest means, I could still have a good quality of life:
public services worked, letters arrived on time, the bus stopped at the scheduled
time, markets had what you need, medicines and medical attention could be readily
found, even if expensive. I could take walks in beautiful parks without fear of
being bitten by a dog, mugged or killed.
After a few years I started to
take these very good things for granted and I started noticing the warts. But,
even then, I compared this life we had with the life we had left behind and the
balance was still, definitively, very favorable. My American Dream was kept
rather intact. Even today I have no doubt that when the U.S. catches a cold is
because most of the rest of the world already has pneumonia.
However, I cannot help noticing
clear signs of deterioration in what is now my country of adoption. Perhaps the
fact of having become a naturalized citizen, which makes me a shareholder, has
contributed to my more critical perspective.
The fact is that I perceive the country is losing ground in several
aspects.
One, the political sector seems
to be losing its capacity to reason things out, to reach compromises for the
good of the country. Bipartisanship had always been a strong quality of
American politics. Today it is being replaced by mutual distrust, acid
exchanges, by looking at dissidents as
enemies, not adversaries, and for an
attitude of upmanship at all costs, disregarding the dangerous national consequences
of harsh political infighting.
The second is the intensification
of racial friction, bordering on open warfare. I had assumed that the presence
of a black president in the White House would serve to minimize this friction
but, to my surprise, it has intensified it. Never before had I seen so much
open animosity between U.S. races as today, to the point that a portion of society has felt obliged to say
that “black lives matter”, something that should be too obvious to be an
explicit social demand. Discrimination
is exercised by whites against blacks and by blacks against whites. Intuitively,
I feel that an exaggerated social attitude among “progressives” about political
correctness has done more harm than good, because now the reaction against this
overstressed correctness is turning violent and has become a political slogan
of extreme political postures.
The third is the decline in the
public regard for the intellectual quality of leadership and its preferences
for notoriety. Looking at the low quality of most of the current presidential
pre-candidates in both parties I cannot help believing that the country could
soon be displaced from its position as leader of the free world, although it is
also true that this deterioration seems to be a global phenomenon. In a country
of 300 million inhabitants it is hard to believe that society could not find a
better candidate than Mrs. Hillary Clinton, the wife of a former president or
that of a still another member of the Bush family. A presidential race in a
democracy should not look like a hereditary monarchy. The surprising popularity
of Mr. Donald Trump is, to my mind, indicative of this deterioration, because
he is a man who seems extremely dangerous to have in the White House in times
of global turmoil and, even more so, as commander in chief of the largest
military force in the world. He has become an attractive candidate to millions
who admire notoriety rather than intellect or who feel that any change is better than what we have
at this moment (Exactly what many Venezuelans felt when they decided to put Hugo
Chavez in power). At this rate of increasing frivolity it is not inconceivable
that one of the Kardashian sisters could become a presidential candidate in the
medium term.
The fourth seems to be, this is
more speculative, that the volumes, speed and quality of the immigration coming
into the U.S. during the last 20-30 years or so are proving difficult for the
country to digest and integrate into U.S. society. This was already the topic of a highly
controversial paper by Samuel Huntington in FOREIGN AFFAIRS some years ago. In
an empirical manner, I find that many Latin American immigrants claim not to be
“happy” living here and feel the U.S. does not give them what they desire. And
yet, no one of them is planning to go back to their countries. They remain here
and have created their own communities within U.S. society, have their own
newspapers and political pressure groups and behave as if they were an independent
state within the U.S. nation. They have not integrated and, sad to say, many
have become burdens to the U.S. rather than social contributors and taxpayers.
The cumulative effect of this alluvial immigration has been to greatly increase
government social costs and to deteriorate social services, including schools,
hospitals and social security programs.
As a result of these perceptions
my American Dream has gone a bit sour. But at my age I cannot move to
Australia, I might not even survive the trip. Nor I really want to do so. I
will remain living in the U.S., which I still see as a great country. I have
come to admire, respect and love the United States of America as much as I love
Venezuela, my country of birth. I still see around me much of the social good qualities
mentioned by De Tocqueville and have decided in my heart that this is the
country where I want to spend the rest of my life. Being a citizen allows me to
be both appreciative and critical. And, being a native Venezuelan, I will keep
trying as hard as I can to persuade my country of birth to adopt many of the good
qualities that have made the U.S. the great country it is today.
