I'm procrastinating big time so I'm making a post...

[agriking]

This got me to thinking; the other day an on line acquaintance on another forum asked the question: what is your nationality and don't say white, say which country your from because we're all immigrants. Now for me the Finnish side of the family is easy; all four of my mother's grandparents were born in Finland. The side of the family that I call

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[halogencycle]

I think there's an American identity, but that we take it for granted because Americans don't get out and visit the rest of the world as the citizens of most rich nations do. Living in Argentina and Chile has made me very conscious of the ways I'm culturally American.

Argentina and Chile are both countries which have been shaped by heavy immigration, like America has, but there's still a distinctive Argentine and Chilean identity, rooted in their history. Our history might not seem long compared to, for example, England's, but it's long enough that quite a lot of it forms a basis for a distinctly American culture, like the way we have often contradictory roots in the Enlightenment and in Puritanism.

I think as the generations go on, people care less and less about their national origins, in part because they lose track of them. Some people are descended overwhelmingly from one part of the world or another, but most Americans are a random mix of stuff, and it only gets more random as newer Americans intermarry with older Americans. It's hard to care about your national origins when you have a dozen or more of them and barely remember what they are.