I Will Never Be Ashamed of Being an American

“A lot of us are ashamed of being Americans right now,” he said. I am not.

The year is 2017. It’s early August. I’m sitting in my first class in my first semester on my first day back to school at my new college in Denver. I’m taking the first step in finally finishing the degree I’ve been working on completing since 2003.

The creaky air conditioning unit whirs loudly in the heat, sitting atop our crappy modular building just west of the campus, across the train tracks, in the shadow of Mile High Stadium, where the Denver Broncos play.

My first journalism class is now over, and all of us students are packing up, collecting our pop quizzes, grabbing our bags, and heading out the door to our next respective classes.

I stuff a folder in my backpack and grab my scooter from the back of the room as I overhear one of my classmates talking loud enough for everyone in the room to hear.

Unlike me, he appears young enough to belong in this 101-level course on the fundamentals of journalism. He’s right where he should be as a brand-new student, probably in his first semester ever at any college.

I feel so out of place here as a husband and father in my 30s, and the neon blue Razor scooter I use to transport myself from the bus depot at Union Station to the college campus only makes it seem more ridiculous.

This is my first class at this college, but it’s certainly not my first class. This is now the fourth college I’ve attended as I try to bring my seemingly endless college career to a close. For over a dozen years, I’ve been trying to eat this elephant one bite at a time, and I’m totally desperate to just… get… it… done…

My loud classmate is saying something I can’t quite make out: something clearly political, but that’s all I can tell.

“Something, something… politicians… something, something… Donald Trump…” he says, I think, but I’m not sure. I wasn’t paying attention until just now.

“That’s how people view Americans these days. But I want to tell them: ‘A lot of us are ashamed of being Americans right now.’”

I pause, unsure if I actually heard him correctly.

Yes, that’s exactly what he said, I decide.

I hop on my scooter and start kicking my way back to the main campus for my next class. As I pump my leg to motor myself uphill, I can’t get this image out of my head.

I’m an American living in America who was just standing inside an American classroom, surrounded by American classmates, at an American university paid for by American taxes.

We American journalism students just learned about the most basic elements of journalism: seeking truth and reporting it, ledes, subheds, nut grafs, inverted pyramids, and, most importantly, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The last item in that list is what enables everything that precedes it: our sacred right to the freedom of speech. It’s the part of our constitution that prevents the government from “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”

In this class, where we’re studying and celebrating the virtue of a free press as the cornerstone of our nation and our liberty, this Constitutional protection is the most relevant—the single most important—guarantee in all of America’s founding documents and one of America’s crowning achievements in its governmental structure.

Yet I just heard a young man say that not only was he “ashamed of being an American”—he assumed that “a lot” of us were.

What?

He knew not what he was saying. …and he certainly was not speaking for me.

And why did he say, “Right now?” Was he saying that Donald Trump being the president of the United States was enough to make him ashamed? If so, how utterly short-sighted and shallow.

I wasn’t a huge fan of Trump’s antics as president, and in this same class, I ended up writing a paper critical of an idiotic Tweet he had posted using a nonsensical word.

“Despite all the negative press, covfefe” was probably the dumbest sentence ever written by any American president. Just about everything Trump was Tweeting at the time was dumb, and I constantly shook my head at all the swirling news stories revolving around the question: “Did you see what Trump just Tweeted?”

All of that was embarrassing. But what does that have to do with being an American?

Nothing.

I know that in my generation, it’s not only acceptable to hate America (as it was in my parents’ generation); it’s fashionable. Many people—Americans even—spew their rage at America while living “off the fat of this great land.”

That they can’t see how ironic this is, especially on a college campus, is something they should be ashamed of.

But being an American is not.

I can’t blame the kid too much: he’s a young, single man, and young, single people say a lot of dumb things. Spouting off ignorant opinions on the first day of school is totally “on brand.”

But still, this phrase sticks in my craw, and I can’t get it out of my head. I keep thinking about it for the rest of the day, the rest of the week, the rest of the month, and the rest of the semester.

“A lot of us are ashamed of being Americans right now.”

I cannot possibly imagine saying something like that.

I am absolutely, positively not ashamed of being an American. Not now, not in the past, not in the future, not ever.

Here I sit on Independence Day in 2024, seven years later, and I’m still affirming my conviction.

I will never be ashamed of being an American.

That does not mean I’m never ashamed of what Americans do or what happens in America. There’s plenty of that to go around.

I am ashamed of the many college professors I had over the years who enjoyed tenured job security at an American university—an unimaginable luxury—living off the people’s taxes yet rolling their eyes at the idea of American exceptionalism.

I am ashamed of the people I met in my college experience who insulted my religion, my sex, and my race: numerous teachers, administrators, and faculty members whose angry rants against “Christians,” “convervatives,” “white men,” and an imagined “patriarchy” were almost a daily event.

I am ashamed of the power-hungry politicians in America who have a limitless appetite for wars all over the world, keeping us in a constant state of simmering conflict on multiple continents across the world in places most Americans don’t even know about, much less support.

I am ashamed of the American corporations who are complicit in spying on us for the government, censoring speech they don’t like, oppressing viewpoints they disagree with, and deplatforming people who stand for traditional American values.

I am ashamed of the quality of our presidential candidates, who seem to get worse every election cycle, despite how we’re also told, “This is the most important election of our lifetimes,” every four years.

But I am not and cannot be ashamed of being an American.

I am blessed to be an American.

I am thankful to be an American.

It’s because of many people who came to America, who helped build America, and who keep America running today that I can call myself an American.

I think of people like Abraham Stauffer, my 6th great-grandfather, who fought against the British in the Revolutionary War. Or Andrew McElwee, my 2nd great-grandfather, who fought for America in France during WWI.

And that’s to say nothing of my grandfather (and namesake), Ronald Stauffer, who served as a fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force.

There are so many others throughout my family tree, both on the German and Irish sides, who served this country in many ways, both in public and private service.

To say I’m ashamed of being an American would be to insult every single one of them.

The German side of my family came to America from Switzerland, escaping religious persecution in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation. The Irish side of my family came to America to escape starvation in the aftermath of the Irish Potato Famine.

America was, to them, a beacon of hope: a promise of survival. As Swiss Mennonites and Irish Catholics, both would have literally praised God when they arrived here: Jesus was their spiritual salvation; America was their physical salvation.

They came to America and became Americans. They chose to become Americans. They fought to become Americans. That is nothing to be ashamed of.

When I visited Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty a few years ago, I got to see first-hand where my family and my wife’s family first stood on American soil.

We have a special place in our hearts for Ellis Island in particular: when my wife’s great-grandfather Salvatore came to America from Italy, he was so thankful to be here that he named his son Ellis. Ellis, in turn, named his own son Ellis, Jr.

So, on a daily basis, our family is reminded of how we came here to America…. and became Americans. Salvatore Menditto even renounced his Italian citizenship after coming here, right before Ellis was born, so that he could become an American citizen. Interestingly, he was not legally required to. But he chose to.

Today, Ellis Island is nothing more than a museum. But we do have a porous southern border that has essentially become the de facto port of entry for the “tired… poor… huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” and “the wretched refuse” of the teeming shores of a hundred other countries.

The border crisis alone is proof that nobody should be ashamed of being an American. People from all over the globe are literally dying to get in, often paying for everything they have despite the threat to life and limb, and even breaking the law to get here: to become Americans.

Again, that doesn’t mean I’ll never be ashamed of America’s actions. America has much to atone for. I’m not a jingoistic cheerleader who celebrates everything America does—right or wrong—from the sidelines. But we truly live in an exceptional country.

The same year I started going back to school in Denver, I was working for a coding boot camp in Boulder. That summer, a coworker and I went to represent our boot camp at a local “Startup Week,” and I sat in the audience listening to a panel discussion about finding employment opportunities in America.

One of the panelists used some of her time talking about how hard it was “to be queer in America” and how she had felt the need to “hide her true self” in the workplace at times in her career.

I found it remarkably ironic how she later described going on work trips to other countries overseas, where being openly homosexual was a crime punishable by death.

Strangely, neither she nor anybody in the audience seemed to notice the cognitive dissonance in her complaint that her lifestyle was “difficult” here in America, yet it was illegal in other countries where she literally had to hide her identity for fear of being arrested or killed, unlike in America where neither of those things were true.

In that same discussion, I was also struck by a strange incident of self-loathing that has sadly become commonplace for too many Americans. One of the panelists, a professor at the local university, was asked a question, and first and foremost, before giving his opinion on anything, apologized to the crowd for being a white man.

He openly wondered why anybody even cared what a white man thought. After his mea culpa, he then said, “America is behaving very badly right now, but it will get better soon.”

At that moment, whether America was behaving badly or not, I was still not ashamed of being an American.

I was ashamed of him, though.

I’m ashamed of a lot of other dumb things that result from the excesses of American culture: TV shows like the Kardashians, anorexic fashion models, rampant obesity, epidemics of homelessness and drug addiction, war-profiteering politicians in Washington, the open celebration of debauchery, race riots, violent protestors, the glorification of blood and gore in video games and movies, and more.

But every country has its problems, and America is no different. At least here, we have the power and ability to change things.

During election years, in particular, I’m reminded of this. I think about how my grandmother, my father, and I are all citizens of the Republic of Ireland—also ostensibly a free country—yet we cannot vote in any elections. We are denied the right to vote because we don’t currently live over there; we are literally second-class citizens.

Yet that’s not the reality in America. As American citizens, we have the right to vote in all elections, no matter where in the world we live, via the absentee ballot. That is something to be grateful for.

There are many things to be embarrassed about or even ashamed of when you look at the actions of America at times.

But I will never be ashamed of being an American.

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