Dear Uncle Sam...
A letter to America from an ex-U.S. Citizen
Dear Uncle Sam,
I remember sitting, criss-cross-applesauce on the floor in the lunch room. It was the 4th of July, and our school principal was doing your bidding. His words still ring in my ears: “Do you know how lucky you are? Do you know that you live in the greatest country in the world?”
Even though I’d only been on this earth a mere 6 years, something in my little spirit whispered: “I wonder how he knows that. I wonder where else he’s been.”
Somehow, my heart knew the spirit of propaganda before my mind knew the word for it.
Now please, dear Uncle Sam, don’t misunderstand me: my entire life drips with the privilege that was offered to me under your star-spangled banner. Never once was I lead to believe that I couldn’t do whatever I wanted to do or be whomever I wanted to be. My teachers, especially the men, championed me. My good grades opened up opportunities that other countries would never offer young women – I learned how to operate Mars rover prototypes and teach the systems to congressmen, and I was only 12-years-old. What gifts you have given me.
My loudness, my voice, my heart of big feelings – your culture made space for them. You taught me what it looks like to feel openly, to dream widely, to speak boldly.
And you let me live and breathe in a country where Jesus was so commonly known that I could explore his character at my own pace. I could argue with pastors and attend Buddhist temples and spend years outside of a church as I licked my wounds of broken mental health – and still, your culture made space for me.
But the propaganda of that First Grade assembly was just the beginning, wasn’t it? You wove it into the very fibres of my high school education, teaching us about your history, emphasising certain points while failing to mention others. You immortalised heroes like Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. while continuing to let their people’s grandchildren fall prey to systems of poverty. You became so familiar with Christ’s name that you paraded it out of context when it suited your political agenda.
You moralised the Pledge of Allegiance and demonised anyone who questioned it.
I’d recite the words, day after day, in the echo of hollow voices, reminding myself of what you taught me: that we left Britain to pursue this word called “free.”
Truly, Uncle Sam, I wish I could bring you into a safe space where humility doesn’t cause you shame, so you can sit down and find rest in listening.
I wish you could recognise the irony that fills your veins.
Did you know that you would become like the oppressors you fled? That one day, your citizens would have to pay thousands of dollars to perform their own Boston Tea Party – to reject the same overseas taxation that you once said was the beginning of our nation’s battle cry?
How can you say you’re in pursuit of freedom when those who dare to leave your lands find themselves in thickest chains? When your international tax regimes are matched only by one other country, a dictatorship, that stands for everything you claim to hate?
How can you say you stand for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness when your economic systems are designed to cripple those who want to study, or travel, or follow their dreams beyond your shores? Are you so desperate for reassurance? Are you so frightened of being found out? Are you so crippled as to need the money of a young entrepreneur, living her life quietly in a sleepy English village?
Do you not know that only listening to Jesus – really listening – can teach you what it means to be free?
Your hubris, dear Uncle, has turned you into what you hate. Your people walk the streets in fear of words and bullets, of riots and revolts, of tyranny and religious indoctrination. Your leaders shout the name of Jesus so loud that they’ve forgotten how to hear him. They brandish ideals which claim to be Christian while turning their back on the widow and orphan. You mythologise bad men and polarise the rest.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
Uncle Sam, I weep at your words. The beauty of them. The hope. The promise. They are words worth fighting for. Worth dying for. And I see with every bone inside me why generations of my family have put on your uniform and raised their weapons for your cause. I see why nations flood to your door. I see why a government with such divine truths written into its doctrine would lure us into a false belief that you are everything you claim to be.
But alongside those beautiful words of Declaration, I hear other words: “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.”
What if the lie was that we needed to be “great” in order to be “good”? That consumerism is our birthright? That Americanness is next to godliness?
What if serving the Creator looked like truly seeing the unalienable human rights He endowed upon those with whom you disagree – the homeless man struggling with addiction, the police officer working to feed his family, the Muslim girl walking to school, the black man wearing a hoodie, the teenager on YouTube questioning their sexuality. What if compassion wasn’t political? What if you trusted that we truly are all made in the image of a good God, and His goodness is great enough to make itself known without your shouting? What if you melted in the truth of His love and simply lived for that love to pour over?
I watch as your culture screams God’s name so loudly that it hurts, and my friends run away to cover their ears. I carry wounds in my body from an evangelicalism that missed the mark in favour of patriotism and patriarchy. Wounds which make me look at old photos and see a lifelessness in my eyes, even as I was taught “Life and life to the full.” A gospel that made me wage war on my body and take responsibility for the evil thoughts of men.
I watch as you turn democracy into parody, sense into senselessness, righteousness into hate. I watch as children die in schools, as good police officers have stones hurled at them, as innocent black men and women are thrown to the ground, as young people are being radicalised and losing their lives to hatred, as democracy is turned to shambles, as refugees flood the country only to find themselves homeless still, as street drugs steal the lives of thousands, as generations are waging war on their own bodies because they have nowhere else to turn to express their grief.
I sit here now in Britain, not perfect but not claiming to be, and I feel safe to walk outside my door, safe to have children and send them to school, safe to feel hope when I go to the ballot office. And I think: “My 6-year-old heart knew.” Sam, you never had the right to claim total victory in all of God’s creation. You are not, and never have been, the “greatest country in the world.”
And what if that’s okay?
What if we don’t need to make America “great” again? What if America isn’t the hero in this story? What if, instead, we just need to love our neighbour? Could you lay your podiums down in pursuit of that simple life? Could you join the rest of the world in working towards a better goal: “Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven”?
Is that not the golden threads of Truth still quietly woven into your creed?
Is it not worth trying?
I believe in better for you. I believed it all the way up to my final moments, renouncing my ties to you as tears poured down my face and my soul cried out from the breaking.
And I believe it still.
Dear Uncle Sam, I will never stop claiming you as my own. You are a part of me. You are family. You raised me and fed me and gave me a voice.
But you also robbed me. You enslaved me to economic systems years after I’d pursued my own happiness on the shores of your forefathers. You brainwashed me into believing that I could find freedom with no one else but you, and you punished me when I discovered the truth: that England was the country that would teach me what it means to be free.
You kept me under your thumb by taxing my dreams, my house, my future, my hope.
I watch the people I love who still live under your banner; I see the fear and sadness and shock as they stare vacantly at the future stretched before them. As they see men of physical and moral incapacity racing to lead them into further parody.
Is this what you think it means to be free?
What of compassion? What of humility? What of disparaging greed?
What if, instead of getting your children to memorise ironic phrases like “No taxation without representation” or “Give me liberty or give me death” or “I pledge allegiance to the flag,” you taught them phrases like “Love thy neighbour” and “The meek shall inherit the earth”?
I wonder, Uncle Sam, if you might find rest then.
If you could discover that listening brings more peace than shouting.
If you could ease your voice from all the noise and find comfort for your soul.
If you could bring your expatriated family back together instead of forcing them to permanently break ties from you in order to survive.
If “one nation under God” could ever become a reality. One nation of men and women and children and people of every colour and faith and tongue. If every one of them could find true safety in your humility to recognise that you are not the greatest nation on earth, and what’s more, you don’t need to be.
What if love was your true revolution? Your claim to greatness? Your battle cry?
Dear Uncle Sam, I will never stop loving you. Never stop praying for you. Never relinquish my identity as “American” even as I claim the freedom of no longer being your citizen. Even as I shout joyfully of the adoption into my new country, my new home, my new name.
It hurts me to say that my release from you filled me with so much relief. But that doesn’t mean I will give up on you. I will continue to look for the voices of your people who shout a banner of love. I will continue to look for the moments that truly reflect the ideals that your greedy politicians spew. I will continue to have faith that your pride has won the battle, but the goodness of your people will eventually win the war. I will never stop praying for your good, alongside the good of every. other. nation. Because we all matter. I know it’s hard to hear, but it’s not just about you. We are citizens of a greater nation, and we are all a part of that story.
And maybe when you realise this, when you rest in the truth of it, you can finally know what it means when the Bible you so proudly carry says that “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.”
All my love in the parting,
