Most of America was not built by people who arrived in confidence. It was built by people who were leaving something — or chasing something — and very often, both at the same time.
Leaving famine.
Leaving rigid class systems you could never climb.
Leaving religious persecution.
Leaving debt, war, enclosure, collapse.
Chasing land.
Chasing dignity.
Chasing safety.
Chasing the idea that maybe their children would not have to live the same crushed life they did.
And in many cases, America was built by people who were not choosing at all — but were forced to leave, forced to move, forced into new identities and new economies they did not choose.
My own family story sits right in the middle of this.
My great-great-great grandparents’ mothers and fathers came from England and Germany. They were lured by the promise of abundance, opportunity, and a new religion that promised not just a better life, but a better future. They arrived in the midst of the Mormons fleeing across the plains and eventually landing in Utah, where they didn’t just settle — they built a kind of fortress for the future. A place meant to be safe from the old world. From persecution. From collapse. From history repeating itself.
They were leaving the old world.
They were chasing a new one.
That pattern — leaving or chasing — is not unique to Utah. Or to Mormonism. Or to my family.
Across America, people are where they are because somewhere in their past, someone was:
- running from something
- or reaching for something
- or doing both with equal desperation
Irish fleeing famine.
Jews fleeing pogroms.
Italians fleeing poverty.
Scandinavians fleeing land scarcity.
Black families fleeing terror in the South.
Dust Bowl families fleeing ecological collapse.
Latino families fleeing economic and political devastation.
Always: leaving or chasing.
So from the very beginning, this country was shaped not by comfort or stability, but by escape and pursuit. By hope under pressure.
That matters. Because it leaves a psychological inheritance that doesn’t vanish in a generation or two.
If your grandparents or great-grandparents lived with real precarity — hunger, displacement, persecution, no safety net, no floor beneath them — they raised children who learned some deep, quiet lessons:
Nothing is guaranteed.
Institutions can’t be trusted.
If you fall, no one is coming.
You must hold onto what you get.
Even when material conditions improve, nervous systems don’t update automatically. Trauma becomes culture. Fear becomes posture. Survival becomes identity.
By the third or fourth generation, the famine is a story. The old country is a myth. The escape is a legend. But the emotional stance remains: guarded, defensive, territorial, anxious about falling back into the pit.
And in America, the pit is real.
Healthcare is tied to employment.
The safety net is thin.
One illness, one accident, one layoff can undo decades.
The punishment for falling behind is brutal and public.
So even people who are doing “okay” often live with permanent background panic.
Over time, the story subtly shifts.
Not:
“We survived because of timing, luck, help, and collective effort.”
But:
“We survived because we’re tougher, better, more deserving.”
That story serves a purpose. It turns suffering into virtue. It turns luck into moral superiority. It turns vulnerability into shame. And it turns solidarity into something that feels… dangerous.
Because if your identity is built on “we built this by ourselves, against the world,” then any suggestion that systems matter feels like an attack on who you are, not just how society works.
This is how you end up with entire regions — and families — organized around stories of chosenness, deservedness, and moral hierarchy.
Including people I love.
My mom. My brother. Good people. Kind in daily life. Helpful to neighbors. Generous in small, human ways. And also inside belief systems that, from the outside, can look strange, cultish, even cruel.
From the inside, it doesn’t feel like a cult.
It feels like belonging.
It feels like certainty in a confusing world.
It feels like safety inside a story that explains who’s good, who’s bad, and why the world is falling apart.
That’s a powerful psychological shelter. And it’s built from the same materials as those original fortresses: fear, hope, memory, and the promise that if you just hold the line, everything will be okay.
What is very American is how easily all of this gets steered.
Because if you have a population whose deep, inherited story is:
“We escaped, we struggled, we built this, and it can all be taken away”
…then it is incredibly easy to mobilize them with:
“They’re coming to take what you have.”
“You’re being replaced.”
“You’re being disrespected.”
“Only we can protect you.”
It doesn’t really matter who “they” are this week. Immigrants. Elites. Minorities. Liberals. Foreigners. The emotional lever is the same: fear of falling back into chaos.
Meanwhile, something very important stays offstage.
Because the real divide isn’t cultural.
It’s economic.
It’s class.
It’s about who owns and who works. Who extracts and who produces. Who gets rescued and who gets blamed. Who lives with cushions and who lives without margins.
But a universal class conversation is dangerous — because it unites people who have been carefully trained to distrust each other.
So instead, we get culture war.
Endless fights about symbols, language, bathrooms, books, flags, gods, and identities — while rents rise, healthcare collapses, pensions vanish, and entire generations are told to accept less and call it realism.
From the outside, this can look like moral failure. From the inside, it often feels like being cornered.
And cornered people don’t become generous. They become rigid.
This is one of the great tragedies of the American story: a country born from leaving and chasing slowly turning that inheritance into fear of everyone else.
The original dream was:
“My children will not have to live like this.”
The inherited anxiety becomes:
“My children must be protected from everyone else.”
So instead of solidarity among people with shared histories of struggle, we get status anxiety, boundary policing, moral ranking, and endless internal war.
To friends watching from abroad: I understand the anger. I understand the fear. I understand the exhaustion with watching this circus export danger to the rest of the world.
But please understand this too: most Americans are not the authors of this system.
They are characters inside it.
People whose families arrived by leaving or chasing.
People raised inside stories built for survival, not wisdom.
People doing their best inside structures they did not design.
That doesn’t excuse harm. It doesn’t mean we stop resisting. It means we aim our anger more carefully.
Because the real fight is not between my family and yours.
It’s between a system that concentrates wealth and power — and everyone else who’s been taught to argue in the dark while the ceiling is quietly being lowered.
If there is any hope, it’s here: beneath all the noise, most people want the same things.
Safety.
Dignity.
A future for their kids.
A life that isn’t ruled by fear.
That’s not an American trait.
That’s a human one.
And it’s the only place a real coalition ever starts.
Leave a Reply