Happy (belated) America Day from Iraq

It's fun celebrating an American holiday abroad. I highly recommend it.

I love that no one understood why we ran to the basement Ferdos market to find sparklers; or why we made a makeshift American flag and saluted to it.

I've never been a huge fan of America. Ha, it's sad but true. I hate her materialism, her ethnocentrism, her arrogance. I've never really appreciated our rights because I lived without them. You know, until now.

How I celebrated the Fourth of July, Iraqi style:

At 9 a.m., on our way to work, we bought cans of Coca-Cola and drank them for breakfast. What is more American than coke - except drinking coke with bendy straws? (Which we did.)

In the office, before our morning meeting, we played American music from our computers - Yankee Doodle, the Star Spangled Banner, etc.

(For lunch we ate Kurdish food instead of American. Whoops.)

At home, someone made a paper American flag and Micah, the two-year-old, waved it over his shoulder like a Continental solider.

We made cheeseburgers for dinner and ate cookies and brownies for dessert.

We played Bon Jovi and sang along.

But more than anything, we taunted our British housemate Anna for losing the war. A Revolutionary War reenactment:

Thank you, Joshua Gigs, for playing the humble colonial soldier.

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In all seriousness, living in a country that doesn't have a Bill of Rights has makes me appreciate, if nothing else, the First Amendment. At home, journalists don't get killed for speaking out against the government. Thank God.

I have privileges in the States that I don't have here. As a woman, I can speak up in America. I can choose whatever career I want. I can join a union! I can petition.

Despite some of my issues with the American attitude, I cannot forget how blessed I am.

So the first and only time I'll ever say it, and perhaps the last time I'll ever say it again: God bless America.


Haha.



Lauren