Steven LaChance Blog

I have debated writing this, but I believe it is our responsibility as writers to record what we observe. This is not meant as a political statement. It is simply an observation from someone who now lives outside the United States and returns several times a year.

I read an article today written by someone who said they had to leave the United States before they understood how much living there had been making them sick.

That stopped me because I understood exactly what they meant.

Each time I step off a plane in the United States, it doesn’t take long before that feeling begins to settle over me.

You hit immigration and immediately there is a tension in the air. I have traveled extensively around the world, and I can tell you that some of my most uncomfortable experiences with immigration have happened in the United States. As a gay couple, my husband and I have even been confronted about being a couple while going through immigration.

Then you leave the airport.

Driving to the hotel, you see the angry messages on cars and signs. You turn on the television and are immediately bombarded with people shouting about everything that is supposedly wrong with everyone else. Anger has become background noise.

You go to a restaurant or grocery store and begin to understand just how expensive ordinary life has become.

This last trip to St. Louis, I noticed homeless people asking for money at intersection after intersection, including places where I never remember seeing that before. Maybe people who live there see it differently. Maybe when something changes slowly around you, it becomes harder to recognize just how much it has changed.

But coming and going makes the contrast impossible for me to ignore.

And then there is something much harder to describe.

It is the tension I feel in my own body.

I feel it when I hear the hate directed toward people like us in a place we once called home. I feel it when I notice the looks. I hear the whispers. We can see you. We can hear you.

There is a hardness in America right now that I don’t remember being this pervasive. An anger. A suspicion of one another. A sense that everyone is being encouraged to choose a side and identify an enemy.

I wish I could paint the entire picture because these individual observations don’t quite capture it. It isn’t one immigration officer, one television program, one hateful bumper sticker, one expensive dinner, one homeless person standing at an intersection, or one stranger giving us a dirty look.

It is the accumulation of all of it.

It is the atmosphere.

And deep down in my soul, I have come to believe that the United States is very sick. Sometimes I fear it may even be dying.

I don’t say that for dramatic effect. I don’t say it because I hate America. Quite the opposite. I say it because this is a country that was once my home, and much of what I love is still there.

But every time we return, the feeling seems stronger.

And every time we leave, the same thing happens.

I board the plane. I sit down. The door closes.

And somewhere between the gate and the sky, I realize I have been holding my breath.

Then I exhale.

Every single time.