My Consequential Country
Traveling the world as a United States citizen is a strange burden to bear
The bartender introduced himself to me as Junior while he prepared my candy-colored, non-alcoholic drink. “And you?” he asked. He stood at a medium height, wore tan skin beneath a cocktail shirt that was ill-suited to the Peruvian desert climate, and had a kindly face that bordered on effeminate.
“I’m Ben,” I replied before he shot obligatorily back, “Where are you from, Ben?”
His tone landed somewhere between courteous and perfunctory.
When meeting fellow travelers, this exchange is almost as natural as breathing. Even in talks with shopkeepers, waiters, or in this case, amiable hostel bartenders, the topic of home is nearly inescapable. Yet, with each new trip abroad, I’ve felt a growing weight buried within the question. And each time it comes my turn to answer it, a quiet dread wells within my throat.
In 2024, I traveled through Mexico and Belize, and every time I announced myself as a citizen of “The States,” the chaos of my nation’s politics would generally at least be a footnote in the dialogue that followed. People would ask me how it was possible for Trump to run a campaign for president — let alone avoid prison time — after all that he had done. Even back then, I wondered whether it might be best to simply identify myself as a Canadian whenever asked about my country of origin.
In 2025, I went to Costa Rica. And by then, the “Where are you from?” question had mounted into a heavier topic still. Not only did I have to contend with the fact that Trump had been allowed to run for office after everything he’d done, but that the country I called home was willing to vote for him in overwhelming numbers. Yet even then, there remained some shred of doubt as to whether his administration would truly devolve into the political hellscape that his most fervent opponents predicted.
“I’m from the states,” I responded unsurely to Junior after a protracted pause. Unsure, not because I was uncertain I’d spent my entire life in the star-spangled, red-blooded, gun-toting USA, but because of how the words might register.
As my reply reached Junior, he turned toward me and responded, “Venezuela.”
I gulped a weighty gulp as I considered the way that Trump had taken the leader of his country hostage, paraded him as a political prisoner, and then proceeded to proclaim himself as the new acting leader and oil tycoon of the nation Junior once called home. I fell temporarily paralyzed as I wrestled with the impulse to apologize over an act I took no part in.
Cups and plates clattered in his hands as he did his best to attend to the few other customers seated at the bar beside me. But I saw a flash in his eyes upon my response that seemed more than the surface level acknowledgement that he customarily reserved for travelers and their answers to that typically token question. A slow and deliberate nod shielded something deeper, and I debated whether to address the elephant in the room — what were his thoughts on what had happened? I decided to broach the subject.
But I raised it in such a roundabout fashion that it exhausted the limits of his English. So I repeated it back a little more directly, and he measured his words for a couple seconds before asking me if I spoke Spanish. Spurred on by the tentative nod of the healthily bronzed gringo seated before him, he launched into heated monologue. But I quickly found that the rapid-fire succession of thoughts emerging from his mouth soared similarly beyond the bounds of my shaky Spanish skills.
With the help of a translation app, he expressed gratitude at receiving the question and unpacked his conflicted thoughts on the subject: how Maduro was a horrendous leader, but that his removal from power created a vacuum that had left his loved ones in even greater danger than in the years prior. He explained that he hadn’t returned home once in the past decade, and that the current climate hardly offered fertile grounds for repatriation. He hadn’t seen his own parents in nine years, and he doubted that he would anytime soon. His eyes glassed up and then quickly sobered.
As I waited for my ceviche to be served, a few Swiss women I’d met on a hike up the nearby dunes walked along the oasis that served as our dusty town’s gravitational center. After greeting me and briefly surveying the restaurant’s menu, they accepted my invitation to join me for a meal. And within a few minutes, the subject of politics came up. Specifically, the politics of my country.
As Americans, we’re continually reaffirmed in the belief that we’re the center of everything. In our very ability to introduce ourselves as “Americans,” there’s an ingrained dismissal of all the other Americas and an enduring proof of our ethnocentrism.
And yet, time and time again, it’s a near-given assumption that the travelers I meet will have a far greater understanding of my country’s political turmoil than I have of theirs. Often, I see that they, too, buy into the conception that The United States is the most consequential country on earth. Given the events of the past year, it’s hardly a wonder why much of the world looks toward us with such begrudging deference. It would be futile to deny the influence we hold.
To call myself an American is to be an ashamed extension of the most powerful man on earth — the capricious leader who says the word “tariffs” and sends the global stock market into a frenzy, who kidnaps the leader of other sovereign nations, who deports naturalized US citizens to countries from which they don’t even hail. Who threatens to take over Greenland and claim Canada as our 51st state.
There’s an enviable anonymity that people have in saying they’re from any one of the world’s many countries that keep to themselves. I wish that the attitude people had toward my home was one of ignorance rather than resentful subservience. I wish that our actions didn’t demand rapt attention from the sprawling world around us, and that our affairs could unfold unnoticed.
Sometimes, there’s a subtle moment of tension that arises as people wait for me to separate myself from my nation’s leadership, to clarify that I’m disgusted by the overreaches of this administration. The Swiss women I had dinner with tried to keep their curiosity at bay as they waited for the signal that they were safe to express their unvarnished opinions.
I spoke about how frustrating it is that both sides of the political spectrum are so utterly incapable of speaking to one another — how both Democrats and Republicans uniformly view their opponents as cult members. And in my lamentation, one of the Swiss women discerned a shred of neutrality, of sympathy toward the MAGA movement. “But… you didn’t vote for him, right?” she asked, a palpable trepidation shading her tone. I happily confirmed her hope and watched as the entire table around me breathed a collective sigh of relief.
As I waited to board a flight from Lima to Cusco, a German man sat beside me. He was another writer. We spent a couple minutes commiserating about just how uncommon our career path seemed to be. Coincidence after coincidence abounded as the hour before boarding dwindled down into only seconds. As we filed into line, he told me he’d spent the past couple of years working on a screenwriting project, and that the finished product was about to premiere in Miami.
“Are you planning to go see it?” I asked as a familiar weight surfaced in the room.
“I would… but I’m just not sure that it’s safe,” he explained.
Trying to make light of this routine friction, I sardonically joked, “I think you’re white enough to be safe.” I wish that the humor weren’t rooted in such a grim reality.
“Well, you may be right. But I hear they’re checking the social media accounts of visitors now, and rejecting anyone who’s posted antifa content. Some Germans are being denied entry into the country, and others are being held up in airports as they attempt to return. The German government advises against all travel to the United States.”
I wish that I could have reassured him that his suspicions were paranoid, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell my new friend that he’d be safe attending the premiere of his own movie. I didn’t know that he would be.
He explained that he not only fears setting foot inside the United States, but fears how each and every move my country makes from here will frame the future of the entire European continent.
To belong to the most powerful country on earth is to inherit part of its shadow. I travel through the world as a private citizen, yet, so often, I’m received as an extension of something vast and unpredictable. Each time I answer that simple question of “Where are you from?” I feel saddled by the weight of a nation that leaves craters wherever it steps.
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I can see how it would be hard to travel. I no longer call myself American.
It is because I think of us as citizens of the USA. To say I am American ignores that we are North American, and that there are other Americans too in Central and South America.
Since I read THE UGLY AMERICAN a very long time ago, I have learned to have great humility. I also think we need to be very upfront about the fact that we hate Trump and everything he stands for, to reassure them. Thanks for your words, Ben.
In the 1980s I was a medical superintendent at a hospital with an attached medical school. One of my briefs was emergency medical services. The Dean and I walked towards his office, and he asked what I taught the EMS. "Americans sue us for not providing the level of care their system provides. Always listen to the accent at an accident. American? Tell the person you are leaving and will call for an ambulance to help. What you do then is up to you." He was upset and said he was Canadian. "Talk like them, be treated like them." Adios, amigo. ¡Buena onda!