Toward America.
Posted by Jim on July 4, 2026
My father sang toward America. I moved toward it.
 By Shane Greer on 4 July 2026I don’t know what caused me to fall in love with America: Old Glory, the bunting, the cowboy hats or the country music sung by Mel Tarner. But I do know where and when it was: early 90s, aged eight or nine, at a working men’s club in East Belfast. Cigarette smoke filled the air, and women ate prawn cocktails served in wine glasses. Every day, people dressed like extras in a spaghetti western. Men with six-shooters on their hips, their wives looking like they just stepped off a wagon on the Oregon Trail. An ever-changing group is square dancing the night away in front of the stage. Then my mum bundling me into the car while my dad, Mel, stayed behind to pack up the equipment.In 2009, I married an American. In 2013, I immigrated to America. In 2021, I took the oath and became a citizen. Five years on, writing this essay from Capitol Hill as we prepare to celebrate our 250th anniversary, I’m reflecting on how far the reality of America in 2026 has fallen short of the one I fell in love with. In many ways, it’s a place that has more in common with the Northern Ireland I left than the place I ran toward. It is a country of political tribes whose symbols project every bit as much contempt for their rivals as a flag flying from a lamppost in Northern Ireland. Our discourse is shaped by the legions of voices that make Northern Ireland’s loudest seem measured. Political violence has become unremarkable.But I had it backwards. I didn’t fall in love with a description of America: I fell in love with the destination. We are a nation whose founders declared all men to be created equal while enslaving Black people. But we have taken enormous strides since then, on the shoulders of marchers, Freedom Riders, lunch-counter sitters, and so many more. They weren’t protesting the promise. They were collecting on it. The people in that working men’s club understood this before I did. They weren’t pretending to be American any more than they believed Mel Tarner was from Nashville. They were embracing an idea of America and understood inherently what it took me thirty plus years to figure out: the dream was never about the facts.This July 4th, the streets around my home will fill with flags and bunting, and I will notice, as I do every year, that I have traded one flag-heavy July for another. But there the similarity ends. Because what we are about to celebrate is strange: a 250th anniversary not of arrival but of travel. The founders didn’t describe what America was. They declared what it must become. Every immigrant understands this in their bones, because emigration is the same act: choosing a destination you haven’t reached and setting out anyway. Which means I didn’t become American in 2021, when I raised my right hand and took the oath. I became American in that club in East Belfast, the moment I started facing toward a place I had never seen.My father sang toward America. I moved toward it. My daughter was born a citizen. She will grow up without an imagined America to lose, but already she’s starting to see gaps between the country and its promise. That’s what it is to be American. That is the machine working. My hope for her is not that the gap closes. It is that she keeps wanting it to. That she stands in whatever America exists in 2076 and still measures it against the one in a working men’s club she’s never seen. Until then, we do what my father did at the end of the night, after the hats came off and the lights came up: pack up the equipment, go home, and come back to do it all again. |