It wasn't just the conveniences of living in the richest (and most expensive) country in the world. The privileges - and responsibilities - of being the world's only remaining superpower. The conveniences and commodities and the enormous well-stocked grocery stores. The big cars and the cheap gas. Those are all double-edged swords.
No, it was the pervasive, if dying, truth that even in the darkest days of discrimination, slavery, war, depression, and fear, that no matter who you were born, with hard work, prudence, good stewardship, determination, and the indomitable American spirit, you could grow up to Be Someone. Or in the worst of circumstances, at least your kids would have it better than you. Even in other First-World European countries, I found this to be devastatingly untrue, which made me always long for home, America, where the homeless and tempest-tossed could make good someday.
This changed with my trip to South Africa. I have never seen a country so resilient and determined. I thought the brutal, dirty stain of apartheid would have irretrievably polluted the national spirit, but I found nothing of the sort. Instead, I saw an entire country of first-generation American immigrants. Working in mediocre jobs, living in shacks, eating minimally, surviving with the least of frills, sacrificing everything to send their children to the best private schools possible, hiring tutors, ensuring their kids studied every spare moment, irrepressible in their determination, convinced beyond doubt that they might die penniless and broken, but their children, dammit their children would be successful, success was within their kids' reach as it was never open to them. A whole country full of welcoming, friendly, helpful people, who, far from being taken aback from calls from foreign strangers claiming kinship and wanting to meet, scolded me for not staying longer and eating more of the extensive spreads they laid out for me.South Africa has a tarnished reputation for widespread and violent crime, but I've felt more afraid in the streets of Chicago and New York. In fact, all the locals went out of their way to warn me away from the bad streets and sketchy characters. It was a country under construction on all three coasts and everywhere in between, frantically trying to rebuild and expand infrastructure in advance of World Cup 2010. A country of hope, of promise, of unfailing hospitality.
I was sorry to go, but even more so as I found myself confronted by materialistic, selfish, cold American society. On the plane into Washington DC, an elderly woman (seated with her husband, on a flight of mostly older couples who had been flying for the past 17+ hours) spent the final 20 minutes prior to landing carefully applying eye makeup and anxiously checking her reflection in a compact mirror. Even at the remotest bush airport in South Africa, the planes flew on time, the stewardesses were young, polite, and attractive, and traveling was a refined experience that left you refreshed at arrival. In DC, our plane was delayed due to striking pilots and a half-full flight, the stewardesses were middle-aged and rude, and the airport filled with angry, frustrated, snappy passengers. The stores teemed with expensive, processed, packaged, useless goods and to get a basic snack cost upwards of $8. The bathrooms were dirty and the people handling our luggage, careless. The line for American citizens at Customs was twice as long and moved half as slowly as that for all the foreign nationals. The CBP agents eyed all of us Americans suspiciously. What was this country to which I returned?
Ubi sunt indeed. I daresay the golden door yet exists, beckoning like a beacon in the night; but the lamp lifted beside it, is it still lit?
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