Our Cultural Labels

I was born in America; I am an American. I was born in one of the Confederate succession states of 1861-1865, within a mainly Scot-Irish immigrant ancestry extending back through states of the Old South; I am a Southerner. I was born and raised in Arkansas, on the Oklahoma border; I am an Arkansan, with a western trace. My American / Scot-Irish / Southern / Arkansan heritage was geographical, distinctly cultural, religious, and familial, all within a predominantly conservative homogeneous setting.

At 21, I moved to Boston, Massachusetts for college. Excepting 2 years after college, I stayed in New England for the next 38 years. My geography, my religious connections, my exposure to vastly different and varied peoples, and my thinking about the world, all evolved. Homogeneity became heterogeneity. So am I now a liberal New England Yankee?

Except that now I am living in the Appalachian mountains of western North Carolina, another distinctly different locale. North Carolina was the home of my primary maternal and paternal ancestors. Am I a transplanted Arkansan or New Englander? Or have I simply returned to my original roots?

In the past, perhaps after one ancestral adventurer moved to start a new beginning, people for the most part lived and died within one place. That one place contained a significant portion of their lineage, siblings and extended family. And that place existed in a culture and support framework extending probably no more than a 100 mile diameter circle. That culture typically lived in near isolation except for tourists passing through, or the books, magazines or movies that gave vague, intangible hints of different worlds beyond. In this isolation, native foods, speech patterns, indigenous careers, and community standards and values took deep roots, flowering vastly different landscapes. If you did travel, you knew clearly that you “weren’t in Kansas anymore.”

As television broadcast images and a standard speech pattern instantly and incessantly across the country (and globe), as franchised food outlets nationalized regional foods, as shopping malls replaced local downtowns with bland repetitive line-ups of national chain stores, our distinct localism and regionalism is being irrevocably lost. With “fresh” Maine lobster, Californian See’s candies, Chicago pizza, and New York cheesecake now available anywhere, the anticipation and surprise of exploring new territories and experiences are increasingly only fond recollections. Sameness, rather than individuality, seems to have become a national priority. When southern-style sweet tea is now available in a prepackaged bottle at McDonald’s in Connecticut, we know that distinctive regionalism and individual identity have suffered a major casualty! The desire for new experiences loses out to the quest for the comfort and safety of familiarity.

Why does all of this matter? Because I believe this increasing loss of geographic / regional / cultural identity contributes to people’s current sense of loss of personal identity. To an increasing anger at a perceived loss of individuality in favor of standardization. A fear of an ill-defined force that is pushing a sameness onto each of us, with a mandate for thinking and behavior that is disconnected from our everyday world. It is a force that seems oblivious and unaware of the framework and reality of our daily lives. It is a force felt regardless of political party affiliation, conservative or liberal bents, religious beliefs, ancestral heritage, geography or race.

So when we see people rallying against health care reform, health is often only a tangential issue. When we see record numbers of people lined up at gun shows to make purchases, the right to bear arms is often only a tangential issue. When “tea baggers” hold up their anti-tax signs, taxes are often only a tangential issue. When “birthers,” led by demagogic politicians and broadcasters, question the citizenship of our current president, citizenship and one’s right to hold presidential office are often only tangential issues. At the heart of these emotional displays is a reaction to a sense of threat to people’s personal life, their personal control over that life, and the disappearance of one’s local community and cultural familiarity. The world feels too big; the individual too small and still shrinking.

This past week, Switzerland passed a public referendum prohibiting the construction of new minarets – those distinctive spires on top of Islamic mosques. This in spite of there being only four minarets currently in the whole country. Switzerland is that historically fanatically-neutral country famous for taking sides on no question, with a long tolerance of multiple cultures and religions. Yet in a country with a Muslim population less than 6% of the Swiss population, cultural fears and perceived threats were aroused and dominated the vote. Spain and Germany have similarly grappled with mosque architectural construction in these long-standing Christian countries, while France and England increasingly struggle with issues arising from growing immigrant cultures. Underneath these struggles is the fundamental question –what does it now mean to be, or look to be, an Englishman, a Frenchman, a German or Spaniard? Where will all those Swiss A-frame cottages or French chateaus go? As some here grapple with having a president who looks very different than all those other presidential portraits, how do the French, the most adamant in preserving their native culture, now respond to a French president with a non-French ancestry?

I expect that Europe, with its history of small homogeneous nation-states, will struggle mightily over the next several years with this issue of cultural / national identification. We in America have been multi-cultured from our founding. Yet even with our long experience, our track record for assimilation has been, and is, very spotty. Underneath our immigration discussions, our educational policies, our “national versus local action” debates, we are in fact still often asking ourselves, “What does it mean to be a southerner, a westerner, a Californian, a Texan, a Vermonter? What does it mean to be an American?” And is our personal label really relevant anymore?