It is something that has puzzled me for quite some time. The fear that I am talking about is a particular kind of xenophobia though, something with which I have been on both ends of the spectrum. It is not the traditional fear of strangers that I am talking about, but rather, something that is slightly more peculiar. Every culture I have experienced so far is xenophobic, unfortunately it seems to be in our blood, but I am thinking about the fear of when people, meaning Americans in this case, want to experience another culture and the reactions of other Americans can be quite odd.
Often, a strange, insecure fear arises that that person might “go native” and not “love/appreciate America” any longer. Or, it can manifest in, “why do you have to go to India, we have Hindus/spirituality in America?” Yes, we do. We have everything in America, but, in an American version, no matter how “authentic” it might seem. I have seen a very large part of America, and I love it for being what it is, America. But, I also love seeing other parts of the world as well, seeing them for what they are. Doesn’t mean that I like what I see always, doesn’t mean that I don’t. It is odd that one even feels compelled the need to “apologize” for seeing the world. Strange, that is.
But, I was once on the giving end as well, so I know the feeling. I remember in parts of Junior High School, I was an “American Boy,” or so it seemed. When “Red Dawn” came out, I remember how pumped up everyone was that high schoolers were going to kick some Commie Red Ass if they ever even thought about coming to America, by God. One of the proud stats of Amarillo was that it would be on the Top 3 places to get nuked because of Pan-Tex. That was a bragging right in the eighties. Slim Pickens as Major “King Kong” from “Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Bomb (in case where you were wondering where this subtitle came from)” was no comic figure for us folks in Amarillo. We were going to ride that bomb to the ground and make a big, glass parking lot out of anyone who tried to stop us, by God.
There is another kind of fear that I have been on both sides of, and it reminds me of a girl from High School. Teri was a very shy, pudgy girl during elementary and Junior High school, but the she lost the braces, lost the weight, got a funky, punky haircut, and hung out with the funky, punky kids, became editor of the school, and got interested in Russia (USSR, of course at that time). Boy, did we have a field day with that one, “us” being the Red Dawn Patrol. Saying stupid stuff like “If you love it so much, why don’t you go there?” and such oldies-but-goodies as “freedom isn’t free” and other banal patriotic whatnot, and Teri stood up to quite a bit of torment. But, you could smell the fear in the air. How could one little girl drum up so much anger without it? The fear was that America being the greatest and only place on the planet to live was suddenly crumbling because, “if just one little ant stands up to us, then they will all stand up to us,” to paraphrase Hopper again from A Bug’s Life.
At the time, I had only been briefly across the border to Juarez while we were in El Paso for a swim meet when I was younger, but my sisters had been to Europe. That was weird to see the pictures of them when they came back and to hear the stories. And, then, they had the nerve to go off and live there and/or study there for a while and one of them even got married in Scotland. Well, then I “had” to go. And, well, spending time in London and Scotland kind of rocked my world.
Eventually, I went back to Europe to backpack across seventeen countries for three months alone. At that point, I was at the point of no return. I was smitten by the drive to see the world. I went across “Checkpoint Charlie” in Berlin and in a simple event that changed my life, I knew that I would never fear another culture in the way that I had before. Don’t get me wrong, there are legitimate fears about cultural differences that I have a healthy dose of, but something changed. After I was on the East Berlin side of the wall, I was about to start taking pictures. Big no-no, for within about two shots, a young soldier with an AK-47 on his shoulder came up to me wagging his finger.
Turns out he was indeed Russian, and about my age, height and, in all honesty, we could have been brothers by our looks. We didn’t really exchange much as he didn’t know but a smattering of English, which was a smattering more of Russian and German than I knew at the time, and we just sort of stood there. He asked me where I was from, and I told him. He nodded, didn’t smile, didn’t frown. Kind of looked wistfully over to the other side of the Wall, and with a wave of his hand said, “now you go.” And, so I left.
I thought about that moment for a very long time and have brought it up in several occasions, mainly because that is whose Commie Red Ass I would have been kicking in my Red Dawn dreams. It was absurd to even think about that at that moment. When I saw that this was what a guy (I was only nnnaa-nnnaa-na nineteen) my age would be doing if I were born Russian, East German, or hell, just about any other nationality on the planet. In other words, I wouldn’t be gallavanting around Europe on my own.
The fear of “Russians” dissolved at that moment. Not, of “Russia, the Bear” and nuclear threat, but of the people. I saw the enemy, face to face, eye to eye, could literally have smelled his breath, and the fear of the enemy was mine no more.
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