Booed on the 4th of July

The fourth of July came and went, again, with no great fanfare. There were no parades, no fireworks, no barbecues, and no renditions of the Star Spangled Banner. There was one American flag, but it got booed…by about 60,000 people.

This year, like the last several years, I passed the 4th of July outside the USA. I say “passed”, and not “celebrated”, on purpose. Spending your national holiday outside your own nation is about the same as not having it at all, because outside your nation, no one knows a thing about your national holiday, except you. They don’t know in particular what your national holiday commemorates, or how it is celebrated, and they certainly don’t know upon what date it falls.

And fair enough. I mean, how many of you know that the Dutch national holiday is on May 5th, and it commemorates when The Netherlands was freed from Germany in 1945? And how many know that Colombia actually has two national holidays, one on August 7th and the other on July 20th, to celebrate freedom from the Spanish and “the flower vase of Mr. Llorente”? For the outsider, central moments of national history come off as useless trivia. Logic aside, it is still a bit demoralizing for one’s national affections to see the 4th of July go by with so little regard.

There was one opportunity to see the day celebrated. I, along with 60,000 other people, spent the 4th of July at a huge music festival in Belgium called “Rock Werchter”. On Independence Day, at the festival, Jay-Z did a show, which was met with enthusiasm from the mostly Belgians and English and Dutch in attendance. Before the last song, he thanked everybody in the audience, saying that he was happy it was such a great show because he could have been home that day, celebrating with his family. Soon after he left the stage, in the lull during the set up for the next band, one of the video cameras taping the concert (and crowd) sought out a man with an American flag in the audience. This image was then transmitted on the gigantic screens that, during concerts, display live footage of the larger than life musicians. This is helpful for the 45,000 attendees who can’t physically get close enough to the stage to determine who is playing.

Anyway, seconds after the American flag went up on those screens, many people in the audience started booing. And they kept at it, until the cameraman switched to some more generally palatable image; maybe it was a pretty concert-goer waving.

Over the past four years that I’ve been living in Europe, I have been forced to accustom myself to anti-American sentiment. Essentially, over here, nobody likes the USA. Most people even dislike the USA. It’s not that they dislike individual Americans (although they inevitably affront them with a lot of preconceptions), and neither do they dislike the physical country. In fact many Europeans would like to vacation in the US, and those that have been report back about nice people, cheap clothes and electronics, beautiful landscapes, and so forth.

So why the boos at the sight of the American flag displayed on the screen at the front of the festival, on US Independence Day? Why the booing just after Jay-Z (an American) and shortly before Neil Young (an adoptive American) were met with full-on festival screams and applause?

One easy answer might be that the US has been the world power for a while already, and people often feel envious of those that have more power. One can almost sympathize with a Belgian saying, “my country can hardly even put together a government, let alone meddle around in most other government worldwide; boo the country that can!” But I don’t think it’s that easy; after all, power figures can be loved, too. The Dutch royal family has had a lot of say in the Netherlands for the past several hundred years, and nobody would boo the queen.

I don’t think anymore that it’s because the US is so full of itself, either. From the immense popularity of Jay-Z at Rock Werchter, it is clear that big egos, too, can be adored. This is a guy so self-assured that he raps about picking up ladies while on tour, when he is already together with Beyonce. You’ve got to be pretty confident to think Beyonce couldn’t quickly find another option were she to discover her current boyfriend fooling around. So I think the US can probably even get away with being self-important.

The thing that I think has really hurt the image of our country abroad is the way our nation has closed itself off to outside input.

The USA is a big, diverse country, indeed. It is a country where innovation has been strong and has changed daily life around the globe. It is a country with lots of its own internal problems that need to be addressed, like a troubled economy, urban violence, and poor health services. Furthermore, the US is an insular country, of almost 300 million people, looking inward, at their own diversity, innovations, and problems.

The problem is that we are also looking inward for all our solutions. Over the past eight years, the US has increasingly isolated itself from outside opinions. Terrorist attacks? The US remakes war as “preemptive attacks” and invents the gigantic bureaucracy that is the Department of Homeland Security. Hurricane demolishes New Orleans? Trust the Federal emergency management agency to take care of it and the Army Corps of Engineers to prevent it from happening again. Global climate change? Forget the international treaty, we’ll come up with our own plan when the time is right. Even the defense department’s contract for new aircraft- “oh, sorry EADS, never mind. We’ll try the tender again and hopefully this time a domestic aircraft company will be chosen for the contract.”

In contrast to the typical news coverage in the USA, people around the world are watching all this happen. Certainly in Europe, the citizenry has taken the attitude that, if the US is so focused on making its own way without any external support, then so be it. The European Union has pulled itself together over the past eight years, as well, into an entity to be reckoned with. It’s importing, exporting, producing, exchanging, and making Union-wide policies that increase interaction and development among its diverse nations.

The Arabian Peninsula has turned itself into a raging business center for Africa, Europe, and Asia, that no longer looks to the US for cues on how to manage its oil, but instead uses its resources with planning and cunning.

China has reworked its export model, and is now foraying into investments in Africa, while the US more or less ignores the continent except for the self-serving food aid.

In other words, as the US focused on its own problems and solutions, and ignored the rest, the rest, left to their own resources, ignored the US and just kept growing, developing, and experimenting. That’s 6,400 million people looking around at the surrounding diversity, innovations, and problems.

I think that by ignoring all of that, the USA has been the one to suffer. There are also many good ideas outside the USA. To deal with climate change, one could learn form the example of the EU emissions trading scheme. The Dutch Rijkswaterstaat knows an awful lot about protecting cities below sea level. Maybe we could learn from Colombia and Israel about how to deal with terrorists, or even better, we could look at countries that haven’t been attacked to see if we could take some cues from them. Maybe we could even let EADS make our defense aircraft! Perhaps this would put some competitive pressure on the aircraft manufacturers so they don’t suffer the same fate as the US auto industry.

Despite the tough times that the US is facing right now, this is not the moment to hunker down in protectionism and nationalism. I think this is the moment to look outward and see what possibilities present themselves- like the possibility to develop a mutually beneficial collaboration with the same sort of people who booed on the 4th of July.