The Guardian: The America I loved is gone

[Dennis Donovan]

The Guardian - The America I loved is gone

Stephen Marche
Sun 20 Apr 2025 04.00 EDT

The first impression America gave me was gentle carelessness. We were driving down from Canada to visit family friends in Texas sometime in the mid- to late 1980s, and a young border patrol agent at a booth, crouched over a newspaper, leaning back in his chair, carelessly waved my family’s station wagon across without looking up. You didn’t even need a passport to enter the United States until I was 33.

You need clear eyes at the border today. Europe and Canada have issued travel advisories after a series of arbitrary detentions, deportations to foreign jails without due process and hundreds of valid visas pulled or voided amid a sense of general impunity. While I have crossed the border a hundred times at least, sometimes once a month when I lived there, I cannot say when I will see America again, and I am quite sure I will never return to the country I once visited.

The America I knew, the America I loved, has closed.

And so I find myself like a man who has been admiring bubbles floating in the air, trying to recall their shape and swerve and shine after they’ve popped.

/snip

[sinkingfeeling]

1. Mine too.

[czarjak]

2. "The American Dream is dead."

Might have been a clue?

[OldBaldy1701E]

4. There never was an 'American Dream'.

That was all propaganda to make us work ourselves to death to make other people richer.

And, boy did it work!

[ancianita]

3. Guardian amplifies one pitiable complaint about a good, great country based on one party's changes at the borders,

which in no way reflects on the 77% of America that did not vote GOP.

What a waste of journalistic integrity. What a goofy, bad faith, stupid opinion piece. pfffffffft

It reflects more on Marche's pitiable lack of effort to have a clear perspective on most Americans in America.
The very fact that Americans IN states bordering Canada still welcome Canadians as they have for two centuries is proof. Canada and the US have formally been trading partners since the US Civil War.

[Joinfortmill]

5. Trump is a Hitler wannabe

We are in very dangerous political waters at this very moment. I suspect it will get much worse before it gets better. I pray we survive the scourge that is Trump, but many will suffer, and some innocents will die, before this ends. I fear our country will bear the stain of Trump for a very long time.

I am very afraid, because any one of us could be next, but I try every day to be brave.

[mdbl]

6. I guess then it's up to that 77% to right the ship to change that person's mind.

[B.See]

8. If you* were an eligible voter,

and didn't even bother, after all Trump had said, done, and PROMISED, then you are part of the problem.

*figuratively speaking

[charliea]

9. One complaint?

He presented a personal account of his experience with American entry points. Noting the transition that he observed over the years. The news now contains many stories of American citizens being improperly detained at entry points, letters from the DHS to American citizens telling them they must deport themselves, and ICE raids snatching unknown numbers of legal residents without due process. With a government currently infested with unqualified sociopathic billionaires intent on destroying our democratic institutions I think he is understating the problem. Perhaps you should read more about current events.

[BobsYourUncle]

11. Oh, Ancianita, I could not disagree with you more.

“one pitiable complaint”??? Are you referring to Garcia? …the gay barber? … something other than the more than two hundred other humans aboard those two planes that ruthlessly transported them to El Salvador?
…
I can’t go on with this post, I’m angry with my inability to express one tenth of all that is racing through my head. My heart is racing, my blood pressure is way high and my hands are shaking.

…

[ancianita]

13. Oh, come on. Disagree, but reread my first sentence

It's my main point.

You show that you really haven't read my point about the author, Marché when you bring up the name Garcia. Where you got the name Garcia, is only what you derived from Marché's far from clear eyed assessment of the 278 kidnapped to El Salvador less than a month ago.
It defies logic that the monthly border crosser, Marché, bases his definition of America on

after a series of arbitrary detentions, deportations to foreign jails without due process and hundreds of valid visas pulled or voided

when at worst, the anti-immigrant vote remains only 23% of America.
Moreover, Marché doesn't even grant that the more destructive DOGE actions of this lawless president are not even the fault of most of that 23% who voted for him. Even in hindsight. If he'd paid as much attention to the rest of American news as his own border crossing fears, he'd acknowledge that the 23% had no clue that "tech support" oligarch's DOGE boyz would be add-ons who would hurt them and/or their families.

Overall, any fair writer and news source knows that Americans who didn't vote for Trump make up the vast majority of the American population.

When a news source gives a platform to anyone who writes "the America I loved is gone" because of trump injustices of the last 2 months, both the news source and writer show they
-- neither knew the real America (millions of whom have held over 1,000 protests in the last 30 days)
-- nor loved the real Americans that ARE the real America. The 77%.

Joe Biden has said more than once that America is an idea. But. Those who love America as an idea, yet do not love the Americans who make that idea real, do not Real-ly love America. Joe Biden loved real Americans and showed it. Right now real America might be down but it's not out. If Stephen "America I loved is gone" Marché throws out the real baby with his own bath water idea, then the real America made of real Americans is better off sticking with the Biden idea of America. Not Stephen Marché's.

23% of Americans are part of the problem. 77% of Americans are part of the solution.

[BobsYourUncle]

16. Okay.

Like I said, I cannot express myself well. I’m not going to try to make my point based on other misadministrations.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

7. This guy at least acknowledges that America looks a certain way to him because of who he is (white economically secure

male). But whoo, what a lot of straining in the meantime.

[betsuni]

10. From Andy Warhol's "America":

"Everybody has their own America, and then they have the pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can't see. When I was little, I never left Pennsylvania, and I used to have fantasies about things that I thought were happening in the Midwest, or down South, or in Texas, that I felt I was missing out on. But you can only live life in one place at a time. And your own life while it's happening to you never has any atmosphere until it's a memory. So the fantasy corners of America seem so atmospheric because you've pieced them together from scenes in movies and music and lines from books. And you live in your dream America that you've custom-made from art and schmalz and emotions just as you live in your real one.

"It's the movies that have really been running things in America since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it. When they show you how to kiss like James Dean or hook like Jane Fonda or win like Rocky, that's great."

[UTUSN]

12. K&R

[Blue Owl]

14. Touched by the feculent fingers of tRump

[Sky Jewels]

15. Ever since Reagan, toxic masculinity and hate and violence

have been spreading throughout the country's blood, poisoning it. It's on life support now. I hope this version of the country dies and another, better, less male-oriented one sprouts up, eventually.