In 2008, I cast my first ever American vote. I was 23 at the time, and a freshly minted American citizen. I’d arrived in the States at 5 years old as a Saudi born, Palestinian immigrant. Still, for reasons political, bureaucratic, and financial, it took the U.S. nearly 20 years to grant me citizenship of this unique nation, this so-called ‘beacon on the hill’. But there I finally was, gleefully consenting to being governed by the U.S. government and asking specifically, that a sleepy-eyed, golden mouthed Illinois Senator be my ultimate representative. There was euphoria.
Like many immigrants before him, my father–a man of few words but of great spirit—risked stability and success to escape the absolute monarchy we had been subjected to in Saudi Arabia. He did this not only so that he could pursue his American dream of freedom, but also so that his brilliant wife and his 3 young, Christian daughters could realize their own dreams.
My father was an unfussy man. He worked tirelessly without complaint, 6 days a week, 12 hours a day. He had few strong feelings, save for his love of his family and his obsession with soccer. He rarely raised his voice and never raised his belt. He didn’t argue politics. He didn’t go to church. He seldom concerned himself with what was occurring in his homeland. He was in America now and that meant he had to work.
We all worked—at coffee and ice cream shops, at retail stores and sandwich joints. I scrubbed toilets and swept floors, washed dishes for hours, and served scowling customers with a smile, memorizing and mastering everyone’s elaborate order. I loved work. I hated work. I had to work.
I also did what many young Americans do: I experimented with drugs, sex, art, and other thrills. I consumed American culture ceaselessly even as a small child, often sat in front of the TV from sunup to sundown, learning about Nirvana and N.W.A., imitating Zack Morris, watching small-town, white teenagers wax poetic about first love.
I wanted to be that white teenager, thin and smooth-haired, meekly professing her unrequited love to the clueless blonde boy in front of her. I wanted to be a Katherine, or a Jessica, not a Heba. Maybe I wanted to be that blonde boy instead, but that’s a different essay. I was utterly obsessed with the history of American culture. I studied TV, music, and movies from every decade of the 20th century, initiating myself into Americanism to the point of expertise. I loved it. I loved America and Americans.
When 9/11 hit, I was a strung-out 16-year-old, depressed and failing out of high-school. By this time, I had already been somewhat politically radicalized, aware, as most Arabs are, of murderous U.S. foreign policy. My very existence as a Palestinian was political, and as such, there was no escaping ‘the political’ for me. This became undeniably clear during the Second Intifada, which took place shortly before 9/11 and laid bare for me the U.S.’ complete complicitly in the brutal occupation of my homeland, where my family has lived for countless generations.
For many Arab Americans, there is life pre and post 9/11. My friends called me a terrorist as I walked through the hallways. I was brought into the dean’s office, where they searched all of my belongings. They rifled through every page of my notebook, looking for “anti-American” symbols that were reported by another student. “What is this,” they interrogated, pointing to a number of scribbles on a page. It was the symbol for the popular American shoegaze band, Weezer.
I was suspended from that underfunded, Los Angeles public high school for organizing walkouts in opposition to the invasion of Iraq. I went to radical spoken-word events. I listened to Rage Against the Machine and The Clash and Ani DiFranco. Eventually, it became undeniable that I had found a calling of sorts, so I straightened up my act and took my political existence to the next level, first getting a 4-year degree in political science, and then going on to study for a doctorate in political theory.
As an undergraduate, I was formally educated in the fundamentals of American government. It was there, in the dilapidated classrooms of the University of California, that I had my radicalism dulled and rounded. I was once again initiated into Americanism, the myths, the ethos, and the legends of our history. I learned about England’s John Locke and his intuitive call for constitutionalism. I revered him and our ‘founding fathers,’ who believed in ‘liberty’ and ‘equality.’ I was impressed by Madison and Jefferson and Hamilton, who designed an ostensibly fool-proof system of governance, where corruption, ambition, and tyranny could be stymied by the built-in checks and balances of this brilliant scheme. Contrary to the cynical cries of the American Right, I was not taught to hate America. In fact, I loved it. I loved America and Americans.
It was at this time that I cast my vote for a President Barack Obama. I knew, to some degree, the significance of this moment for the US. As American schoolchildren, we learn about the heroic black Americans who engaged in civil disobedience for their basic civil and political rights, and how Nice White People finally helped these heroes live lives of dignity. Back then, I saw the Obama presidency as the inevitable outcome of a progressive society. Liberty and equality were real. Americans of color just had to work hard and be patient and they too could one day have power, thanks to the wisdom of our framers.
My sisters and I ran through the streets the night he was elected, shouting joyfully at the top of our lungs. Fuck Bush! He and his cronies helped Wall Street rob the American people blind! And they killed millions of Muslims and Arabs overseas! Now, a Democrat, a sophisticated oratory genius and handsome man of color was going to set this country right!
By the middle of Obama’s 2nd term, I had been disabused of this notion. I graduated college just as the devastating global Great Recession was setting in. Again, I had to work. But there was no work? My sister, too, had no work. My cousins, my friends, my fellow graduates, all freshly BA’d or MA’d, could not find meaningful or even marginally lucrative work.
I watched as Obama and the American war machine continued their imperial assault on the Muslim world and did virtually nothing to prevent Wall Street Evil. I despaired at the ruling in Citizen’s United vs. FEC, as the Supreme Court, wherein this unelected group of aristocrats perverted the First Amendment by giving billion-dollar corporations ‘personhood’ and as such, unlimited “speech” rights in the form of enormous campaign contributions. They would soon flood American elections with even more money, making the decade after the 2010 ruling the most expensive in this history of American elections, capturing our elected officials and diluting the speech rights of everyone else. I saw Angry White Americans on TV express shockingly racist views that I had not seen before, insulated as I was in the diverse liberal suburb of the San Fernando Valley.
There was a reckoning within me. I was never totally naïve, of course; I’d known about the US’ abuses worldwide, but before this moment, I had clung to the belief that I was citizen of a righteous nation wherein good, hard-working people could have reasonable disagreements about important problems and that if we could just get rid of the Truly Bad Apples, we could be righteous once more.
But here I was, a good, hard-working American, failing to secure even the most basic of needs for myself—housing and healthcare. But I did what they told me to do? I grew up, gave up my dreams of music stardom, and went to college! How was I 27 and still living with my parents? I was overcome by existential dread. I started to read more books and watch more documentaries. I became uniquely consumed by the details, causes, and consequences of the financial crisis, particularly the failures of regulators and the global dimension of a nation’s political economy.
I decided then, after quitting my (basically) minimum-wage job as a teacher’s aide, that I should apply to grad school. Not because I was obsessed with financial crises, though I was. But because I needed money. I needed healthcare. And I needed work that would make use of my intellectual and creative potential, as I had long been a creative who could no longer stand the drudgery of alienated wage labor.
Thankfully, I got into a mid-ranked PhD program. I also got sick. Inexplicably, unexpectedly, and in short order, I was in stage 3 kidney failure. They say an autoimmune disorder was suddenly triggered, maybe by antibiotics, or stress, or years of disordered eating, which began in a desperate attempt to be that thin, smooth-haired white teenager. I did hours long chemo infusions, biopsies, blood transfusions. I took many pills. I ended up on dialysis. I received bills for $30,000 from hospitals–$15,000, $6,000, $22,000, $2000, and so on and so forth. I threw every bill into an old Bloomingdale’s Brown Bag and never looked at it again.
Where did they expect that money to come from? I did not choose to get sick. I had very little say over the treatments I consented to. Even with the supposedly Cadillac-level insurance policy the University of California had enrolled me in as a graduate student and TA, I was receiving bills for absurd amounts. “What the hell is wrong with this country?” I thought. “Who decided that life-saving medical treatment should be subject to market forces?”
Worse, I was offered little grace from my employers for being sick. I could take time off for treatment and recovery both before and after my eventual transplant, but then I’d have to pay for expensive healthcare, which I could not afford even with income. But I wasn’t even going to have income if I went on necessary leave. What the hell was I supposed to do?
My endlessly supportive mother and father—the former of which literally gave me her kidney—stepped in to pay for my healthcare, and my rent, and my food, and my clothes and literally everything while I recovered without income from a life-threatening illness. I was lucky to have them. I do not know what I would have done had I not, and had they not, been in the position, as many parents aren’t, to provide this support to their children.
Thus began my ultimate and enduring antipathy towards liberalism, capitalism, and of course, America. I returned to grad school in a state of complete outrage. Eventually I made a pivot; I had long been a scholar of international political economy with a focus on financial crises. Upon my return, I found all of that literature to be couched in the unquestioned, anti-social logic of neoliberalism.
There was no questioning of the very basic building blocks of society. I wanted to ask and to know: What is the point of any political community? What is the goal of governance? Who is it all for? I read furiously, from Aristotle to Aquinas, Schumpeter to Davis. I read Du Bios and Foucault, Friedman, and Goldman. I familiarized myself with liberal, conservative, communist, anarchist, feminist, and critical race theory.
Most importantly, I read history—complete history. I studied actually existing capitalism, democracy, war. In a word, I studied America—this country and its people that I once so loved. I studied it in books and seminars but also online, on Twitter and Facebook where I found both like-minded thinkers and hateful ideological opponents with whom I sparred until I was mentally unwell.
I studied it in classrooms, where I was now that professor responsible for relaying the fundamentals of American government. Should I tell them the truth? Should I tell them what I was never told? About the depths and depravity of America’s dual original sins of Native extermination and chattel slavery? Should I tell them about our framers’ hostility towards the impoverished masses—and democracy in general—leading to the enshrinement of elite rule in the Senate, which serves as a kill switch for popular governance through equal representation of sates and the filibuster? Should I tell them about the 3/5th clause? The failures of reconstruction? The lynching? The Black Codes which allowed Angry Whites to imprison newly freed populations and enslave them once more through the convict leasing system?
Should I tell them about the American-as-apple-pie attacks on the very existence of Black and Brown Americans through institutionalized white supremacy—the electoral college, which is the direct legacy of slave-state interests and has one too many times thwarted the will of the majority. The redlining, which denied even the most ‘respectable’ of Black Americans housing and relegated them to the crumbling ghettos of this nation. The gerrymandering–and other voter suppression tactics–which allow state legislatures to dilute the voices of the most marginalized by drawing nonsensical district lines. Do I tell them about the history of police as slave catchers and strike breakers? The continued and statistically verifiable targeted police brutality, criminalization, and imprisonment of the poor and people of color? They will say I am trying to radicalize the youth. It’s not my fault that the truth is damning enough to radicalize them.
I learned America, too, when my healthy, 57-year-old father was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. He didn’t drink or smoke. He ate well and exercised regularly. After decades of back-breaking work, he had finally built his small family business into a mild success, by which I mean he was no longer in outrageous debt, he didn’t have to worry so much about the mortgage on our modest 2-bedroom home, and he could afford to go on a trip every couple of years. By this time, my mother, who arrived in the states as a scared, uneducated 25-year-old mother of 3, had transformed herself into a highly educated and widely respected mental health professional. Thankfully, she was able to enroll my father in the family healthcare plan provided by her nonprofit employer. At least he had healthcare.
It was the worst year of our lives. Nothing prepares you for watching your beloved father, this vibrant, independent hero who gave you everything, wither away to nothing. We had a few long conversations while he was sick. I don’t remember any long, thoughtful conversations with him before he got sick. When was the time for them? He was always at work.
In one of these conversations, he conceded that he was ready to die. He expressed some regret about not getting to watch his grandsons grow up, which gutted me then and guts me now. He also expressed his desire to relax more, see the world, and spend more time with his family. He resented the fact that he had finally worked himself into a position to be able to enjoy the fruits of his life-long labor, but he was now being robbed of that opportunity. I fight tears as I write this.
What if college education had been subsidized, and he did not have to pay for everyone’s degrees? What if healthcare were universal, and he didn’t have to manage funds for everyone’s expensive and inadequate medical insurance? What if housing were affordable? Could he have worked less? Would he have had time to relax and see the world? To have more conversations with me? To watch his grandsons grow up?
What I learned about America, ultimately, is that we are a nation of, by, and for oligarchs, that the brilliant scheme that our ‘founders’ had developed was in fact a way to simply insulate themselves and their wealth from the poor and colored masses, who are to this day, regularly murdered or maimed in imperial wars, go hungry, sleep in the streets, and die of treatable diseases.
“Be thankful you aren’t in Saudi Arabia,” my opponents say to me. At least here I can drive, and wear a bikini, and get gay married. At least here, I can write critical things of my government. Here, in the land of the ‘free’, I am not subject to arbitrary rule of tyrannical government. They say this to me as the oligarchic white supremacists and Christian nationalists adjudicate away my reproductive autonomy, my voting rights, and my religious freedom. They say this as they call queer people the most hateful of names and pass the cruelest of legislation, all aimed at stomping queerness out of sight. They say this to me as I mourn 19 schoolchildren slaughtered by a weapon of war, because while I have an inalienable right to an AR-15, I do not have a right to clean water. They say this to me as I work 60 hours a week, just like my father did, still struggling to secure my most basic of needs—housing and healthcare.
“You hate America,” they say to me. And I can no longer offer a convincing retort.