Prize Winner's Remorse
Lazlo, you got robbed.
When I was in sixth grade, I won an essay contest. It was sponsored by the town chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and its topic was “Why I am Proud to be an American”. Technically, I tied for first place with a classmate, Lazlo Fuzesi. Based on content, Lazlo should have beaten me. He wrote about being carried across a storm-swollen river by his father as their family fled to freedom during the Hungarian Revolution. My essay was a cliché-heavy ode to Baby Boomers’ America, in which I recounted Fourth of July parades and the “chills running up my spine” when I heard The Star-Spangled Banner played before my brother’s little league baseball games.
In no way is this a brag, though I will say I was stoked, not as an American but as a aspiring writer, to get my picture in The Hamden Chronicle and a $25 U.S. Savings Bond. The truth is, I was an eleven-year old kid who didn’t have to stretch to write quite sincerely on American pride, which I’d been steeped in since kindergarten. Growing up white, Christian, and middle class, I knew that no country on Earth was better- more just, more free, with more opportunities for every citizen!- than the United States, and those countries claiming otherwise were just jealous, or spouting Communist propaganda.
Today, I was thinking about how far I am from my childhood vision of the United States. We’ve seen the gilt crack and fall away from the lily, only to discover the lily is, and has always been, decomposing underneath. We live in a disparate, imperfect non-union. Try writing a patriotic essay about that.
America is the place people came to in search of a better future. Sometimes these journeys required tremendous courage and sacrifice (e.g. Lazlo’s family) but the truth is that this beacon-of-hope nation was built on the displacement and decimation of indigenous people, the scourge of slavery, and now, the brutal systemic racism that still serves to subvert people of color. Despite the pledge we were required to repeat with our hands over our hearts, there has literally never been freedom and justice for all.
Basically, once upon a time I won a contest for sentimentally validating the myth I’d been raised on. I felt at the time that what I was writing was true, but now, looking back, I suspect I’ve identified when my fiction-writing career began.