\n<\/p>\n
This summer, I did a gig as an international cat courier. As a favor, I agreed to fly from my home in Spokane, Wash., to D.C., meet my sister-in-law and travel with her to her new government post\u2014taking responsibility for one of her two cats\u2014on a plane to Algiers.<\/p>\n
Having never visited a Muslim country, I was game, though people who\u2019d traveled widely warned me that Algiers is unusually conservative and restrictive. I got warnings not to ask about religion or politics. A friend who works for the U.N. gave me a talking-to about what to wear, which boiled down to: no exposed skin. <\/p>\n
My sister-in-law would start work the day after we arrived, so I\u2019d be on my own in a country where my options were limited. You cannot use credit cards, only cash, and can\u2019t change money. I\u2019d tough it out and then five days later head to Italy for a vacation. <\/p>\n
The only thing I could do in Algiers was walk around, make friends with many street cats, and talk to strangers. In French brushed up from college with some recent Duolingo practice, I\u00a0spoke with shopkeepers, chatted with security guards outside embassies and met people hanging out on the streets. I didn\u2019t always bother conjugating verbs and probably misgendered every noun.<\/p>\n
What I found were people who love their homeland and were eager to show me around. Even in a country that fought for independence in the 1960s, endured a bloody civil war in the \u201990s and now exists under a repressive government, pride endured. But I also noticed what wasn\u2019t there: easy travel, open political discourse, casual criticism of authority. Their pride lived alongside careful silence.<\/p>\n
In my layover on the way home, I struck up a conversation with a Delta employee from Algeria. I told him how generous and openhearted I\u2019d found everyone I\u2019d met. His face lit up. \u201cIt\u2019s good now. It\u2019s better.\u201d But when he spoke of the government and the civil war\u2014even in the Minneapolis airport\u2014his voice dropped to a whisper. <\/p>\n
He now lived in the U.S., scanning bags as they rode around the carousel, having earned a Ph.D. in economics in his home country and taught for 30\u00a0years at a university in Poland. He would be going \u201chome\u201d to Algeria in September.<\/p>\n
People, I\u2019m just gonna go there and say it: I love America.<\/p>\n
Given my politics, profession and (hippie Vietnam War\u2013protesting) parentage (father: regional public faculty; mother: community college and Ivy lecturer), I\u2019m a little surprised to find myself feeling a surge of patriotism, especially these days, I know I\u2019m expected to be cynically critical of everything our (legitimate) government does. Many of my friends and colleagues dismiss folks who vote differently from us and wave a virtue flag at \u201cthose people\u201d who drape their homes in red, white and blue.<\/p>\n
And yet, many who share my convictions about diversity, equity and inclusion have often been intolerant of others. We\u2019ve gotten shouty, telling others they\u2019re wrong, uneducated and a bucket of creeps. Maybe some of them are. Maybe some of us are, too. But we sure have stopped talking to each other. We\u2019re not even getting the same news or finding the same facts. Some of my friends say they’ve become numb to what’s coming out our nation’s capitol. Not me. Every day I am shocked by where we are now, and where I fear we might be heading (another bloody civil war).<\/p>\n
In academe, we have the luxury to spout off. We spouted and in 2016 learned a big lesson: Not everyone was buying what we were selling. Which is how we got to the current political, cultural and societal shit show.<\/p>\n
And yet, I still love America. I love the values expressed in the documents that established us, written in such beautiful language I often assign them to creative writing students. The autobiography of our funniest founder\u2014the first best-selling book\u2014still carries so much wit and wisdom I\u2019m filled with awe and envy when I reread it. The America Lincoln described in speeches with the brevity and power of a prose poem can bring me to my knees. And I love that over the past two centuries, our best leaders hoped by their criticism to form a more perfect union, to correct the many things we\u2019ve gotten wrong.<\/p>\n
Just before I boarded a long and uncomfortable flight, a friend sent me a link to Ronald Reagan\u2019s last speech. In it, he quoted from a letter he\u2019d received: \u201cYou can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman\u00a0\u2026 But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.\u201d His point: \u201cIf we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.\u201d<\/p>\n
If you\u2019d told me decades ago I\u2019d write in praise of Ronald freaking Reagan, I\u2019d have said that\u2019s as likely as 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em>\u2019s HAL becoming reality. But, well, here we are.<\/p>\n We can\u2019t stop critiquing our country\u2014that\u2019s the essence of democracy and the real value of higher ed. But instead of just spouting off about what\u2019s wrong with America, we need to model how to engage constructively with imperfect institutions. We need to teach our students how to critique while also participating, how to demand better while acknowledging what\u2019s worth preserving.<\/p>\n Seeing a country like Algeria, that has closed itself down politically, isolated from the other North African nations and in many ways the rest of the world, even after throwing off colonial rule, felt like a cautionary example. In higher education, when we shut ourselves off to uncomfortable truths or dismiss those who disagree with us, we risk becoming like that whispered conversation in the airport\u2014fearful, constrained, diminished.<\/p>\n Which is why, after five days of wandering Algiers with bad French and heat-slick layers of covered skin, I boarded my flight to Rome to stuff myself with pasta alla carbonara, gelato and vigorous discussions about what\u2019s wrong with today\u2019s world with an odd mix of relief and resolve. You don\u2019t have to think your country\u2019s perfect to love it, but you do have to notice when the door\u2019s still open and fight to keep it that way. In democracy, as in academe, the moment we stop letting in new voices, new challenges, new possibilities, we begin to die from the inside out.<\/p>\n Rachel Toor is a contributing editor at <\/em>Inside Higher Ed and the co-founder of The Sandbox, a weekly newsletter that allows presidents and chancellors to write anonymously. She is also a professor of creative writing and the author of books on weirdly diverse subjects. Reach her here with questions, comments and complaints compliments.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This summer, I did a gig as an international cat courier. As a favor, I agreed to fly from my home in Spokane, Wash., to D.C., meet my sister-in-law and travel with her to her new government post\u2014taking responsibility for one of her two cats\u2014on a plane to Algiers. Having never visited a Muslim country,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19275,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[1973,11803,11799,11798,495,11800,11802,11801,6447],"class_list":{"0":"post-19274","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-country","9":"tag-dirty","10":"tag-escort","11":"tag-feline","12":"tag-higher","13":"tag-muslim","14":"tag-patriotismeven","15":"tag-reaffirmed","16":"tag-word"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19274\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}