I did not need to belong to anyone.
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Answers What do you think of the United States?, see how other cities answered
To quote this piece: “I did not need to belong to anyone,” We Them Media, https://wethem.xyz/watch/a-finnish-immigrant-on-not-needing-to-belong-vermont. Each transcript line links to its second.
Ten minutes in Vermont with a Finnish immigrant who went back to Finland last year to find out whether he still wanted to live there, and came home. His answer to why is not the one the format usually gets.
He starts carefully, and says why he is being careful: “we are very careful about what we think of America.” Then he says it anyway. Finland is small, five and a half million people, well educated, and to him that means people there “tend to have the same ideas and attitudes about things.” The United States has “so many groups, subgroups of, you know, religions, political views, et cetera, racial”, and the conclusion he draws from that is the opposite of the one usually drawn: “here I was more free. I didn’t need to belong to anyone. I didn’t need to listen to the same thing every day.”
Asked whether he means he can think more freely here, he does not soften it: “I don’t need to belong to any sort, and I don’t.” The only other place he has felt it was India, “another big democratic, you know, democratic kind of”, and the difference he lands on is age. India is old, Europe is old, and the United States is “not very old. It’s like a toddler.”
He also says plainly why he took a long time to become a citizen. “For a long time, I didn’t want to become a citizen because of their slavery, because of the way Native Americans have been treated, the Latinos, and they felt like I’m signing under all that stuff.”
What changed is a story, and it is the centre of the piece. At a roadside jewellery stand in Arizona he told a Navajo man what he had been carrying. The answer was four words: “we bear no grudges.” He drove back to Vermont and repeated it to his friends. He went back the next year, found the same man, told him so, “and as I said that I realized I have a lot of grudges.” The man’s reply is the thing he has kept: “we are brought up that way.” His own verdict: “wow, the wise culture.”
Asked whether the country has something to learn from indigenous people, he goes straight to the Iroquois, “actually a federation of different tribes”, and their influence on the early republic.
Then the family. He proposed Finnish names for his sons and his wife “was just rolling her eyes.” She was American, from Garden City on Long Island. She has died; he says it in the middle of a sentence about something else. He decided not to teach the boys Finnish, and explains it as a translation problem rather than a language one: “The way you use the words, the expressions, the way they relate to life, was so different.” One of them is angry with him about it now. They hold two passports each. One visited Finland last year and it was, he says, “a wake up call.”
At the end Maceo asks what he would ask people around the world. He does not ask about politics. “What makes them happy in the place that they are actually living in?” And then, because he is not sentimental, the other half of it: “And what makes them unhappy?” It is a fair question to put to a country he chose twice.
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