Patriotic

I cannot believe I was out of the United States for my second favorite holiday: Independence Day. I love everything about the day: the heat, the parades, the fireworks, the BBQs, the family time. I also love the cheesy patriotic-ness of it all. I love the feeling of comraderie and friendship among friends and strangers as we belt out the songs "I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free".  Maybe you can tell that I am feeling weirdly patriotic this year. I always love the holiday, but this experience of living in a different country has shown me more explicitly how blessed I am to be born in the United States of America. 

One of the major things that I have learned while I have been in the Middle East is that the USA is not the only great country. There are so many other great, happy countries where people are free to live the lives they want to live. They are blessed to be born where they were born. They are happy and healthy and able to live fulfilling lives.

The other major thing I have learned while living out here is that there are many not-so-great countries where people are not happy.  There are countries where people live in a constant state of war, countries where certain groups of people are oppressed and abused, and countries where humans are not allowed to live in the ways that they want to live. They are not happy, they are not healthy, and they are forced to live a life  that is out of their control. 

The most striking thing to me is that the people who are blessed and born into happy and safe countries are just regular humans.  They are just like the people who are born into unstable or oppressive countries. I did nothing to deserve the life that I was born into. I am no better than my co-worker who is getting paid a lower salary than me but doing the exact same job, or my taxi driver who wanted to be a teacher but did not have a way to go to university, or the laborer who had to leave his family behind to move to another country where he is working long hours in the heat to build me a luxury high rise apartment building. The only difference between me and these people is where we were born. 

I am going to stop this post here. My brain spirals from here into all sorts of emotionally-charged topics like racism, immigration, refugees, charity. Honestly I am not a good enough writer to portray my thoughts and my heavy heart can't take people meanly disagreeing. 

So instead I'll end the heaviness of this post with a picture of how Independence Day was celebrated in Dubai. Have you ever seen anything more American?!