The other half, Evlin Dubose

Evlin DuBosewrote about the ridiculous anti-lockdown protests sweeping through America in April. Her eloquent piece was crowned the winner of The Comma’s Semester 1 Competition.

THIS FEELS CINEMATIC — LIKE a zombie slasher, or that Soderbergh oracle from ‘11. You could laugh or cry at the sheer absurdity. This year has been a fiery, flooded, warring, disease-riddled trip through the looking glass, and just for good measure, there are alt-right human truck-nuts protesting in illegal crowds in the middle of an actual pandemic for their right to…get a haircut.

Hey, I get it. To make fun of Americans is punching up, and you wouldn’t be wrong. We are (were?) the world leaders, and yet we’re fat. We’re mighty and gung-ho—and gun-ho, for that matter. We bleed red-white-‘n-blue, patriots galore. We’re casually racist. Woefully uneducated. Always surprised to learn there are countries other than America. We’re a land of migrants (but recent arrivals can take a hike, or scrub our toilets—just ask Kelly Osbourne). We pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and come first in everything— sometimes by tripping the competition. It’s the land of opportunity, if you work hard enough, and there’s something so darn charming about our blind, bellicose optimism and faith in our leaders. USA! USA!

Never mind the fact that things such as diet and physical/mental health correspond closely with income inequality—as does quality of education (if you ever received one) and the ability to travel outside your own hometown bubble. Never mind that America is one of the most economically unequal first world countries. Never mind that a vocal minority who subsists on untruths can find their voices amplified through the megaphone of the media.

And for what it’s worth, you wouldn’t be wrong. But you wouldn’t be entirely right, either.

I know, on this particular front, Americans have a weak leg to stand on. The land of generalising and othering foreign countries has a tenuous claim, at best, to being generalised and

othered. Hell, you could even throw out a, “not all Trump supporters,” or, “not all Republicans,” after any rant I’ve given since 2016 I’d rightly cop the flak. But hear me out: this generalising needs to stop: For everyone.

For context, I’m half-American, halfAustralian. If you could hear my accent, you’d tell. Most Americans think I’m vaguely British, or perhaps Canadian. Irish? No, South African. Wait: Austrian. Final answer. One American was even impressed with how good my English was, and asked me if Australian is a difficult language to learn. Not surprised, right? These stereotypical stories make good ice-breakers, though I tend to leave out the observation that when I moved to the States at age eight, I was a white, middleclass, secular immigrant, and that the microaggressions that traumatised me in school pale to almost anyone else’s experience. It’s not hard to wonder (or know) how bad it can be. I was never kept in a cage, or ripped from my parents. I was never told to ‘go back to where I came from’; I made that choice on my own.

What would surprise most Australians, though, is that over here, the experience is much the same. Granted, y’all tend to be a bit friendlier about the accent. Mostly it’s something to talk about with the cashier. But if anything, I’m profiled more because people here accurately pick my accent. A classmate was once surprised when I turned up for my second year at UTS, because, quote: “I thought you were an exchange student.” (I’m not). If I make a social faux pas, or look the wrong way before crossing, it’s never because I’m young, or an idiot, or even just a fallible human. It’s because I’m a dumb American. I have all the alienation of being a white international student but the privilege of a naturalised Australian. I’m stuck.

I can’t imagine what almost every other migrant must feel, even in Australia. My people weren’t those under fire during the Cronulla riots (coincidentally, led by the Australian human equivalent of truck-nuts). I know some alienation is par for the course in any culture; I try to wear my difference proudly, though I still sometimes feel ‘other’. This is all to say that I don’t often feel like I have the right to speak out on Australian fallacies—but I am speaking out now.

I’m tired. No matter which country I’m in, I’m always defending the other, and I’m so, so sick of it. I’m sick of feeling ashamed, and explaining away bad behaviour, and trying to assure people ‘not all Americans’, though definitely some Americans, and not all Australians, though definitely Pauline Hanson. And I’ve seen that bad American behaviour up close, the kind on display in the news right now. To me, the sight of a red MAGA hat gives the same cold gut-punch as that of a swastika. It’s heartbreaking, because the majority of Americans can’t stand the alt-right, either. We want our country back. We’re sick of the division and so, so, so sick of the lunacy.

My parents currently live in Austin, TX, home of the Alex Jones-backed anti-lockdown protests. For those who don’t know, Austin is a haven for true-blue Democrats, where the hippies and hipsters gather in an oaken, hilly sanctuary away from the rest of rust-redRepublican Texas. Sure, we see our fair share of MAGA hats, but they usually waft in from out of town. When I asked my father what he thought of the Austin protests, he claimed the photos on the news made it look like a

Picture: Lucia Mai

radicalised army. In reality, there were only dozens. More than likely, I have more people in my uni year than they had on those capitol steps.

I can’t justify the mindset of those protestors. They were behaving badly, and emotionally. I can offer this, though: they’re just as scared, isolated, and angry as the rest of us, only their leaders and media heroes are actively lying to them (or even worse, peddling dangerous halftruths). Their frustration has become externalised as vitriol, their shame as righteousness.

They feel attacked and marginalised and frustrated with inaction (yes, I know—I know). They’ve been left just as economically uncertain as anyone in the 99%, and without a social safety net (that yes, I know they’ve argued always against). They simply want to return to normal. We all do. And we all know their misguided grandstanding will bite them. The truth will out, it always does. Sometimes, I wonder if we’re living through the second season of HBO’S Chernobyl. In its opening scene, the show asks: “What is the cost of lies?” For us, it’s been 47,684 American deaths, as of 23 April 2020. And there’s far more to come.

That number doesn’t seem real, yet. It won’t ever be real till the grief hits home. And it hasn’t hit home for those protestors—not yet. But it will. If there’s a safe prediction to be made these days, it’s that we’re all likely, in the end, to know someone affected.

My parents were two weeks away from moving back to Australia when the travel ban went into effect. It’s easy to feel like my family is trapped in a collapsing country, while my brother and I are kept safe down here by a flattening curve. What if an American relative comes down with symptoms? Our relative ease in getting tested in NSW is a godsend compared to the disaster in the States. That lack of testing makes the scale of the problem—already incomprehensible—likely

an order of magnitude worse than reported. Trump maligns COVID-19 as the “Invisible Enemy” as part of his political spin, but he’s not wrong. What we can’t see is both terrifying and unreal. But it’s often hard to take what we can’t see seriously, and those protestors couldn’t see past the lies they’ve been fed. They don’t know how bad the problem really is.

Our individualism, institutional inequality, and beloved American Dream have proven to be our undoing. What we used to value about our culture is now a liability, and that hurts. American society is facing a reckoning, the kind that exposes the most deeply held and papered-over cracks. Think of the millions staying at home, or the first responders putting their lives on the line. Think of the Americans caring for the vulnerable with brave and quiet dignity. Think of the Americans who just want to feel normal but instead feel helpless, just like we do Down Under. Those are the Americans I know and love. Those are the ones I see. But for the justifiably enraged and confounded who can’t see past the MAGA hats, as a half-American, all I can offer you is this: I’m sorry. I get it. Please believe that we’re going through hell at the moment. And that manifests as an insidious, conservative ugliness in a small, vocal, infuriating minority. I hope, when the time comes, we will emerge from isolation valuing empathy, not fear. I hope the grief makes us kinder, not angrier. And when the time comes, I hope to remember the good as much as the bad—about America, about everything.

Because nothing — nothing — is defined as

Evlin DuBose was the winner of The Comma’s Semester 1 competition which was generously funded by the UTS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS).

the sum of just one of its parts.