A moving piece in response to the darkness attempting to overrun America and the world
I Was a “Terrorist Country” Refugee Who’d Grown Up Shouting “Death to America.” America Trusted Me Anyway.
Could she have guessed that in just a few years, I would pledge allegiance to the American flag in my elementary school with actual pride in my heart? That I would spend my entire young life watching Saved by the Bell and trying so hard to be a “real American”? Could she have imagined that I would go to law school, take the oath of citizenship to my country, and spend a recent Thursday walking up and down our street with my three daughters selling Girl Scout cookies?
...
But now, when I think about the immigrants and refugees from “terrorist countries” that soon will be banned by executive order from coming here, I am one of them. I know that some people fear us and want us to leave. Just a few weeks ago, a gentleman followed me around a local Trader Joe’s yelling at me to “go back to my country.” But this is my country—even though this resurgent tribalism seems to puts people like me on the outside. The irony for me is that it was Iran’s tribalism and nationalism that put my family out in the first place. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s regime had said “Iran First,” too. They silenced the press, kicked out all the “others,” and ran the liberal intellectuals out of the country.
I hope that’s not what happens here. But even if it does, this is my home and I will keep working to make America great because I have so much hope in America. It had hope in me—that Muslim kid, in a visa office, from a terrorist country, whose future was a completely open landscape. And that beautiful bureaucrat stamped “Approved” on that blank space.
I Was a “Terrorist Country” Refugee Who’d Grown Up Shouting “Death to America.” America Trusted Me Anyway.
Could she have guessed that in just a few years, I would pledge allegiance to the American flag in my elementary school with actual pride in my heart? That I would spend my entire young life watching Saved by the Bell and trying so hard to be a “real American”? Could she have imagined that I would go to law school, take the oath of citizenship to my country, and spend a recent Thursday walking up and down our street with my three daughters selling Girl Scout cookies?
...
But now, when I think about the immigrants and refugees from “terrorist countries” that soon will be banned by executive order from coming here, I am one of them. I know that some people fear us and want us to leave. Just a few weeks ago, a gentleman followed me around a local Trader Joe’s yelling at me to “go back to my country.” But this is my country—even though this resurgent tribalism seems to puts people like me on the outside. The irony for me is that it was Iran’s tribalism and nationalism that put my family out in the first place. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s regime had said “Iran First,” too. They silenced the press, kicked out all the “others,” and ran the liberal intellectuals out of the country.
I hope that’s not what happens here. But even if it does, this is my home and I will keep working to make America great because I have so much hope in America. It had hope in me—that Muslim kid, in a visa office, from a terrorist country, whose future was a completely open landscape. And that beautiful bureaucrat stamped “Approved” on that blank space.
