April 16 is the day I become an American. In the fullest sense of the word, I will also become a dual citizen with Australia, the country where I grew up.
I am deeply thankful for this privilege. Yet I cannot help but reflect on the widening chasm between the founding principles of the American nation, to which I now swear allegiance, and the current state of…well, the state itself.
I have called the United States home since September 11, 2009. I was twenty-five years old, born and raised in a small Australian town of roughly 4,000 people. The “Lucky Country,” a land of indescribable beauty which offers a fascinating case study in political structures.
Given our humble origins as a penal colony and the famously laid-back, “happy-go-lucky” persona we have proudly exported to the rest of the world, you’d think that same rebellious streak would translate into a healthy distrust of government. In reality, the opposite is true. In my experience, Australians tend to place far greater trust in institutions than many outsiders expect. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the widespread bewilderment most Aussies feel when they ask, “Why on earth does anyone in the United States need guns?” It’s a question that makes perfect sense for a nation whose very creation never depended on winning a revolutionary war.
Trading my quiet Australian upbringing for the bright lights and chaotic energy of Los Angeles was jarring, but it also sharpened my perspective. I do not claim to have arrived politically enlightened; far from it. But I do believe I was less captive to the tribal red-or-blue conditioning that so many Americans absorb from birth.
In Australia we felt the horror of the September 11 attacks deeply and sincerely. Those of us who were of fighting age genuinely wondered whether we might soon be asked to bleed in a war at the behest of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. So when I stepped onto American soil, I was willing to embrace the promise of the new president, Barack Obama: peace, non-intervention, and a humbler foreign policy.
Those broken promises should sound familiar to anyone who feels wronged by the absolute betrayal of our current administration. It’s not surprising that a recent Gallup poll shows a record-high 45% of U.S. adults identifying as independents. Given the clear disgust and betrayal felt by the majority of Republicans and independents who reelected Donald Trump after another reprehensible military venture in the Middle East and the abandonment of every fundamental value that won Trump the popular vote, I’d bet that number sets another record this year.
Perhaps because I grew up outside the territorial pressure to pick a team, and because I retained enough of a free mind to see through the endless propaganda, I began asking questions. Thankfully, a good friend answered one of them with a single sentence that changed everything: “Have you heard of Ron Paul?”
Never mind the Republican Party’s shameful mistreatment of him. That one question led me down a path of genuine discovery: what true liberty actually means, the proper (and severely limited) role of government in our lives, the logic of negative rights, and how easily we are misled when we outsource our morality to a so-called two-party system that is, in reality, an oligarchy masquerading as a democracy.
Herein lies the quiet conflict in my heart as I accept the solemn privilege of becoming a U.S. citizen.
Will I be loyal to the Constitution? Absolutely. I believe there has never been a system of government so eloquently designed and imagined as the one outlined in those documents.
Do I expect the same courtesy from our so-called leaders? No.
My newly minted fellow countrymen and countrywomen, we are approaching a potential point of no return. The familiar statement, “We’re from the government and we’re here to help” will be an easy sell in this climate to people who don’t truly understand why they are getting poorer.
They do not see that an out-of-control state, paired with a fiat monetary system engineered to pass the bill to the next generation, is the very engine of their declining living standards.
They do not see their intervention into every aspect of our lives as a mechanism for control. The more we outsource our moral foundations to the state, the bigger and more bombastic the levers will become to generate a reaction and a vote.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness can still be a winning message. But the shot clock is running out. Let it not be our fate that the American experiment dies on our watch.
Instead, let it be revived, strengthened, and carried forward by a new generation that refuses to trade liberty for the false security of the state.
My fellow Americans, we have work to do
