You Hate America, But You Never Want to Leave? Make It Make Sense.

Only in America do you get this particular flavor of confusion.

People marching through American streets waving the flag of another nation. Chanting America is Evil. Celebrating American foreign policy failures. Then, ICE shows up, and they cry to stay in the country they just called the problem.

It's a contradiction impossible to ignore and almost nobody wants to explain honestly. So let's do it.

The actual answer nobody wants to say out loud

Cultural pride and wanting to live somewhere are two completely different things, and conflating them is either lazy thinking or deliberate dishonesty.

Italian-Americans wave Italian flags at the Feast of San Gennaro. Irish-Americans paint their faces green every March. Greek-Americans have entire festivals dedicated to a country most of them have never lived in. Nobody asks them to make it make sense. Nobody tells them they have to choose between heritage and citizenship.

The flag you wave and the passport you hold have never been required to match. That is not a new American idea. It is a very old one.

But that's only half the answer

Here is the part that actually deserves the harder look. There is a difference between celebrating your culture and actively rooting against the country you chose to live in. Cultural pride is not the same thing as political hostility. Waving a Mexican flag at a parade is not the same thing as cheering American casualties.

One of those things is heritage. The other is something else.

And the honest frustration underneath this conversation is not really about flags. It's about the feeling there's a set of rules about what it means to be American that applies to some people and not others. That assimilation was demanded of every previous wave of immigrants...until it wasn't. The people who followed the rules and waited in line watch others skip it to completely bypass the system.

That frustration is real. It is not racist to feel it. And it gets worse, not better, when the people feeling it are told they are not allowed to ask the question.

People don't leave good countries. They leave countries where the conditions made staying impossible. The same governments those foreign flags represent are often the reason those people left in the first place. Corruption, cartel violence, economic collapse, systems that eat regular people alive and hand the proceeds to the connected class.

Sound familiar?

People crying at an ICE detention center all of a sudden aren't so keen to leave the country they show much disdain for and go back the the one they apparently love.

What actually makes no sense

The flags, the chants, the political theater on both sides. That's noise.

What makes no sense is a system that has had porous borders for fifty years,

built entire industries on undocumented labor, looked the other way when it was economically convenient, and then acts shocked when people made lives here and don't want to leave.

What makes no sense is that the people screaming about the border the loudest have spent decades in office doing absolutely nothing about it because the cheap labor was useful and the anger was more useful.

What makes no sense is in the people who built a system exploit these people and then act surprised when your countries cultural identity has been erased.

Make it make sense.

Stay Frustrated.