America Is Not What It Meant to Me

Some years back, at the border on my way from Sierra Leone to Guinea, I was directed to a small room for immigration checks. A few people were lined up at the door and inside. I eventually weaved my way into the room and stood behind the single fan blowing on the customs officer behind a paper-filled desk. He asked for my passport. After leafing through it, he handed it back and said, “Dix mille.”

I know a little French, but I acted like I didn’t understand. One of the other travelers, with a Liberian accent, translated for me in English.

“10,000 for what?” I asked the officer in English. “I have my visa!”

Though he didn’t respond, I suspected he understood what I was saying. And realized that though I may have a typical Guinean name, I was not from around there.

The Liberian traveler advised me to just pay. “As Liberians, we don’t need visas to enter the country, but they still make us pay,” he said. I still refused.

Eventually, the customs officer waved me off without a word. The other travelers were impressed. As I was with myself.

That was the American in me. That was thirty years of living in America in me. That was studying in America in me—learning about justice and the rule of law; that even the smallest and poorest among us can stand up to the biggest government in the world and prevail. It doesn’t matter how big your gun is, if you wear a uniform or represent the state, and I am just an ordinary citizen, I have rights. If I stay within my bounds, you can’t tell me nothing!

I know—America had me full. Full of hot air, like I could fly.

Here comes the needle.

A friend once posted about one of DOGE’s over-reach. I commented, “I keep a level head about all DOGE is doing.” They were aghast. “How do you keep a level head?” they asked. Because I know executive orders are reversible by the next president, I said. If they are illegal to begin with, the courts would stop them.

I believed in America even when I learned about its dark history, because I felt America has it right on the papers that matter: Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. Even when the courts got it wrong, they’ve had it right for the most part in recent years. And if it’s there on paper, I believed it would always find its way home to justice and fairness.

I know I’m not alone. When Dr. King began his “I Have a Dream” speech with “five score years ago,” he was reminding the nation of one such paper. And the “checks” he referred to later in that same speech were these papers. I believe these documents gave us the Civil Rights Bill and all the progress we’ve made in restoring and respecting human dignity—insofar as it relates to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In my second year in America, I learned about the three branches of government in my high school American history class. Even at that young age, I thought it was a brilliant setup—a system that would stop any one group or person from gaining too much power and abusing it. I thought it was the genius of the American system, why the system was still strong while many countries, especially in my part of Africa, still struggled under one dictator after another.

Now I’m not so sure. Because I don’t think America has three coequal branches of government anymore. Not when the president can unleash the military on a state not in rebellion and Congress does nothing. Not when the saying “no one is above the law” is supposedly fundamental, yet the Supreme Court rules that the president cannot be held criminally liable for wrongdoing. Not when a core tenet of the Bill of Rights—the 14th Amendment—can be questioned, and residents and naturalized citizens can be arrested and deported with no due process. The Supreme Court is clearly ideological (if not partisan), Congress has so few noble and patriotic men and women, and the president has lost his mind.

One day, listening to NPR, I pulled into my garage and couldn’t leave the car. It was a story about how President Trump went after WilmerHale, a law firm that had worked with the state and other parties in many of his court cases, including his election fraud claims. Because the courts couldn’t give him what he didn’t earn, and his rebellious supporters on January 6th couldn’t take it by force, now that he was back in office, he is going after the law firms. He essentially destroyed WilmerHale as he promised he would. By revoking their security clearance and limiting their access to federal buildings. A Washington, D.C., firm whose majority of cases involved either representing or defending against the federal government. If he can do that, what else can he do? Stand in the middle of Times Square, shoot someone in cold blood, and get away with it? He said he could.

If he can pardon people who attacked the Capitol in a failed coup attempt—who killed police officers in the process and raised the Confederate flag in the halls of Congress—yet a few months later charge a disgruntled Justice Department employee with a felony for throwing a sandwich at some police officers, what else can he do?

How different is the U.S. now from any authoritarian government, where people’s rights are only what those in power say they are, and can change at their whim?

Now, I don’t know how I would act when confronted by a corrupt government official in Guinea or Sierra Leone who is acting outside the bounds of the law.