American: looking for a common history

One of the things that I find uncomfortable about my life (and the list is long: I suppose that is due to all my over-thinking and over-analyzing) is the history of my culture.

Okay, maybe it is not the history exactly but the lack thereof.

See, I envy older cultures where a mythology and system of beliefs has been built and changed over time. I look at Chinese or even British culture and I wish I could claim those myths. But nothing fits us. I mean, yes, we have unbridled optimism that certain types of governments work, and we have Thanksgiving...but those are hard to build a world view from.

I think if you have an old culture, you can forgive the mistakes because there are other things to balance them out. I've always felt that my culture is a hodge-podge of European cultures as a foundation and then that foundation was bred with genocide, enslavement, and a thirst for capital. If you're looking for riches, it is a nice recipe. But I have a hard time with the ethical legacy. And that doesn't even add in the Christian mythology that preaches the destruction of all other mythologies.

So, when I watch a film, say like the Last Samurai or Pavilion of Women, I am both jealous of the "other" culture, and sickened by the implication that the Americanization of the world is a wonderful thing. I find it particularly offensive when the story is couched in a love story between a Caucasian man and an Asian woman.

But all of those feelings really stem from my own discomfort. I feel lost, like that part of my human-ness (a long cultural history) has been denied. But there is a long cultural history, I know. It is just that we live in a country where we don't have a SHARED cultural history. We come from all over and we came here by many different means. My background is privileged, even if not rich. I am descended from slave owners in one of my blood lines. Many of us are. Many others of us are descended from the enslaved people. Still others came here to escape genocide or are all that is left of the genocide of their Native American ancestors. Some come here to make better lives, to escape starvation, to educate themselves, to give their children that all powerful American dream: willing to sacrifice their history for a new one.

Two hundred and fifty years just isn't long enough. And if I go back further, the paths are tangled so that I don't really know what history is my own. Maybe this is a product of my more recent (relatively) desire to escape my immediate family: to cast off the immediate history and replace it with my own. Isn't that precisely the American dream?

But what happens when we do that successfully, and then find that our history was important after all: that cutting it out was like cutting out a vital organ we didn't know we needed? It might be more than just discomfort I am feeling.

I guess I'm just wondering how we manage all this. Our shared mythology in America tells us that we can let go of our past mythology to join the capitalism of our dreams. So, we give up our families and our histories, and we move to where our jobs are. We postpone children until the bank accounts reach certain numbers and our educations are complete. We remove our grandparents from our children's lives so that we can live in big houses and wear nice clothes.

But what stories will I tell my children if I ever have them? What mythologies do I want to pass on?

What here is worth giving?