I'm not excited. I think the United States is over personally and has been for a while. I went from someone who enlisted in the Army during wartime and reupped twice to not even really thinking of myself as 'American' anymore, since America as it exists in my mind doesn't even exist in real life. I don't feel any allegiance to the body politic as a whole, and a big reason for it is because it's so brown. If all these blacks and Indians and Mexican and Somalis and Guatemalans and all the rest are 'American', fine. Then I'm not.

If there were another terrorist attack on New York like there was on 9/11, my response would be 95% ambivalence because those aren't my countrymen, and 5% satisfaction because they deserve it. Same if something happened in California or Minnesota or Illinois or any number of other places. At my core, I no longer see those people as my people.