In the final year of my undergraduate degree at a small liberal arts college in South Dakota, I wrote a poem entitled I am a piece of lint, which, of course, is a funny thing to say. And yet, it captured the notion that I am composed of bits and parts of the world I tumble around in. Life growing up on the prairie is mixed in with living in South Limburg and other parts of Europe, including Budapest, Prague, and many parts of Germany. Some cosmic cohesion holds me together.
I am reminded of this poem because I had the joy to spend the Ascension holiday with a group of friends from my Penn State days, where I completed my master’s and PhD, where I met my husband and where I forged strong bonds with a group of brilliant, entrepreneurial, and compassionate people from various corners of Europe and America. They are part of the assorted origins of lint me-pieces, and I know that I am the better for it.
The second reason that I am reminded of this poem is growing up in the Midwest of America means that I fired a gun. It was a shotgun, hurling lead pellets at a target. I pulled the trigger. I did not like it and my aim was terrible. It is true that guns are a part of American culture, as is hunting and fishing, especially where I grew up. Many men and a few women I know are avid hunters with trophies mounted on their walls of all kinds of critters.
But the gun culture of my youth is not the same as that in America today. While my dad owns a deer rifle and a couple of shotguns, today I know Americans who have arsenals of hundreds. I know men who own the AR-15 assault rifle that seems to be the weapon of choice for mass murderers. Today, in America there are more guns than people—400 million—and, in some states, it is easier for an 18-year-old to get a military-style assault rifle with high-capacity magazines than it is to buy a dog. In my youth, politicians did not vie for election through brandishing a gun in their tv adverts. Gun manufacturers did not market tragedy to sell more guns.
Perhaps knowing many worlds—that mix of lint-me pieces that started tumbling, tumbling together in my youth, that caused me to reflect about who I am on a regular basis and what forces shape me. Perhaps that kaleidoscope, together with my American and European friends, can form convincing arguments that this gun culture in America today is wrong and leaves everyone much less safe than the America I knew in my early life.
Roberta Haar, professor of Foreign Policy Analysis and Transatlantic Relations at UCM