A few thoughts about countries on the occasion of a certain national birthday.

Countries. Nation-states. I’m gonna be honest, I don’t care for them.

I didn’t always dislike countries. In fact, for most of my life, I didn’t think about them much at all. Why would I? We drink water, we eat food, we live in countries.

At least, we do now. We didn’t always. The modern nation-state (or “country” or just “state”) is a relatively new phenomenon. They come in all different varieties, but for the sake of simplicity, let’s just say it’s a sovereign political entity with territorial boundaries enforced by the nation-state, and the people inside that territory are governed by the nation-state. As far as I can tell, the modern state is a largely European invention, roughly dating back to the Treaty of Westphalia (1648).

A state is related to, but distinct from a “nation” - which can be understood as a group of people with a shared collective identity of some kind, often based on some combination of language, culture, ethnicity, religion, and/or territory. There’s some debate about whether the concept of a nation rose in response to the creation of early forms of states, or whether states were created as nations - or national identities - arose and demanded them.

Either way, at some point in the past, let’s say, decade or so, I started coming across thinkers (mostly anarchists… don’t tell the government!) who were critical of or opposed to the idea of a state. This was around the same time I started to read more about prison and police abolition, another construct that I accepted without question… until I started questioning it.

Most of the things we go about our day just accepting - countries, police and prisons, supreme courts, kings and presidents and dictators - are all completely made up. For most of human history, they didn’t exist. Which is why we ought to question them more. Interrogate and criticize them. Perhaps we dig into the history and pros and cons of these things and decide they are, in fact, a good way to organize society. Perhaps we decide they’re not. The point is, living in countries is not like eating food and drinking water. Countries are a figment of our collective imagination. Food and water are not. And if our collective imaginations are producing systems that are violent, oppressive, sometimes genocidal, perhaps they’re worth interrogating?

I don’t care for countries because they are inherently violent. You can’t enforce an imaginary line (a territorial boundary) without violence or the threat of violence. You can’t create a nation-state without creating an us versus them identity, an in-group and an out-group. Often, you can’t create a nation-state without ethnic cleansing and genocide. My country, about to celebrate its 250th birthday, wouldn’t exist but for land theft, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Our national identity - White, Christian - has always been a completely false construct, designed to facilitate oppression and violence on a land where White, Christian people have only existed for the blink of an eye, relatively speaking.

You might be tempted to point out that people have always organized themselves into groups, and all sorts of animals claim and defend territories. I’m not opposed to groups (aka communities) and I’m not opposed to those groups being in relationship with the land they’re on (which you might call a territory). But while we’re at it, I also want to point out that humanity has historically been a species prone to epic migrations, much like countless other species whose lives span the globe.

So as one of the most inventive and creative species on the planet, I can’t help but wonder: how else could we imagine organizing ourselves? If all this is just made up, and what we’ve made up is seemingly inextricable from oppressive social hierarchies and violence, it seems to me that any person committed to peace and equality would be open to at least brainstorming some alternatives. Could we be clever and compassionate enough to imagine organizing ourselves in a way that doesn’t rest on the premise that we can imprison or kill our neighbor if they cross an imaginary line?

On the occasion of the United States’ 250th birthday, a lot of folks who are dismayed with where we’re at as a country are choosing to celebrate the principles on which the country is founded. The myth of what we could be, at our best, if we just lived up to our founding documents.

But I, for one, am over it all. The Declaration of Independence, after all, declares Native people “merciless Indian savages.” This country was always a project of genocide and empire, designed by and for wealthy White men. A democracy only for some.

I’m not sure there’s much value in a myth that uses lofty ideals to disappear entire peoples and their history. I’m not interested in America, what we are or what we could be as a country. I don’t care to defend imaginary lines or mythologies that cause harm as much as they inspire.

I’m interested in truth. I’m interested in honest reckoning, not just with what we were, but with what we continue to be. Our history is not history. We rounded up, expelled, and slaughtered Native peoples to build this empire. We enslaved African peoples to build this empire. Never in my lifetime has this country been more explicit in its project of violent White supremacy and Christian nationalism than it is now. We still enslave people, we just call it prison labor. We still round up, expel, and slaughter people who are not White. I’ve watched them hunted down in my very own neighborhood. It’s not that history repeats itself; it’s that history and the present are one and the same.

So no, I’m not interested in America. I’m interested in what else we can build. But not on the ashes of everything we have now. I wrote last year about my love for certain elements of Americana. A minor league baseball game, hot dogs and ice cream. Fireworks (to my great shame as both an environmentalist and someone who loves the animals who hate our affinity for explosions).

I went to college in Colorado, and drove multiple times a year between Colorado Springs and my home outside of Cleveland. I remember one road trip moment vividly, heading west on I-70 across the vast expanse of eastern Colorado, the biggest sky you’ve ever seen, the Rockies rising dark on the horizon in the distance, and tumbleweeds - thousands of them - blowing across the plains like a great herd of strange animals. In the dozen or so times I did that drive, I’d never seen anything like that before or since. It was so surreal and so magical. Who needs mythologies when this land - our land - is so astonishing all on its own. Who needs some manufactured nationalist identity when we have Mark Twain and James Baldwin and Ada Limon and Louise Erdrich, Robert Johnson and Billie Holiday and Nirvana, Dolores Huerta and Lucy Parsons, and the countless stories of the Native peoples who give voice to the land itself.

I don’t dream of America with the flag waving and the fighter jet flyovers and the anthems and pledges compelling loyalty to the nation state. I dream of the things birthed from the land itself, the music and art and films and stories, the relationships and communities inextricable from place.

When I dig below the territorial borders and state lines, below Manifest Destiny and the Mason Dixon, below Red versus Blue, below layers of myth and lies, I see what seems to me the natural way of things: a kind of cultural bioregionalism. Sometimes it’s silly things, like upper Midwest dudes wearing shorts when it warms up to 40 degrees or Missouri float trip culture. Sometimes it’s more profound, like Jesmyn Ward’s Black southern gothic stories that are somehow both universal, and could also only take place in the fictitious but very real Bois Sauvage, where the landscape itself is always a main character.

I have a deep love for the Midwest. Not because it’s in America and I’m American. Not because it falls within the borders of particular states I’ve happened to spend most of my life in. It’s much, much deeper than anything that could be examined on a map or represented on my passport or driver’s license. It’s about the plants and animals and people and land I’ve spent most of my life with. It’s about what grows here, and how I’ve grown with it.

So no, I won’t be celebrating America tomorrow, not the myth, or the ideals, or the hope of what we could be. I won’t be celebrating our system of imaginary lines that give us cover to exclude and otherize and do violence. I won’t really be celebrating at all. But I will take a moment to go outside and listen to the familiar songs of robins and chickadees and sparrows, and I will be grateful for this community I have.

And I will hope that someday we can do away with the imaginary lines altogether so we can join each other, freely, and appreciate the magic that happens when people live together in a place and create beautiful and unique things that can only come from their special mix of minds and bodies and land and history and truth.

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