The blogster doesn't tease its* audience much but will make an exception today.
You might even think, boring, we know there are Americans who don't like their country, so let's move on to Disney.com.
How would you feel when someone tells you you can pick up a US passport at any time and the response is 'no, thank you'?
We do not mean the five thousand or so who gave up their US citizenship in 2015.
Is this even imaginable in times when seemingly every Republican and whatever you call liberals these days warns that the population of the whole world would drop whatever they are doing, including making other peoples' babies, and rush to the airport to get to the promised land?
Nobody tracks the number of people who could walk into the nearest US consulate or embassy with their papers and get citizenship but have decided not to. The simple, and most likely, explanation for the absence of figures it that they cannot be easily tracked. The U.S. simply does not know how many of them there are. It is probably a safe bet to say that, in Germany alone, there are more than US citizens who give up their citizenship.
Having a hard number would also be awkward and very upsetting to nationalists and public figures in love with the image of the US as the shining city on a hill. We know that much because of heated arguments about dual citizens who are either not American enough, think Ted Cruz before he renounced his Canadian citizenship or Brit boy Boris Johnson, who was upset that he had to pay US taxes for the privilege.
You may or may not have met an American who doesn't want to be one.
A man you would definitely not forget is the jovial biker on Highway 1 somewhere near Big Sur in California. With a US registered motorcycle and a lady who could have passed if she remained silent, he was the open hearted American traveler, greeting strangers as friends you haven't met yet.
And yet, when asked where are you from, he would say Germany and give you the name of a small town in the south of that country. He was from a military family, one of the thousands who never leave.
If you made the mistake to ask him why he had decided to have only German citizenship, he would tell you that a vacation to the U.S. was all he needed. Why would you want to live in a country where things as basic as health insurance were fought over, he would ask. At that point, it would have been wise to stop and chat about travel and the weather.
Well, if you didn't, you would have gotten an earful about stupid wars, about an education system based on money and privilege - and that was long before the pay to play rush to full privatization under Trump.
Other people with American parents outside of the U.S. keep their motivation private, and in some families, the divide between American and Other runs right through the family. The blogster knows two siblings, one decided to be a German citizen, the other went for being American.
There are also intermediate folks, those who fully identify as Indian, as French, or as another nationality but get American citizenship for career reasons or so that their children have more opportunities without submitting to the haphazard US immigration system.
It is the others, those who say no, thanks, who show us most clearly who we are not.
* Gender neutrality is easy, see.
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