We Dream It. You Live It.

How American invention shaped the modern world

I always say that I don’t mind non-Americans insulting our country, but they have to do it on something that we didn’t invent. Considering that we invented electricity, the desktop computer, Google, smartphones, social media, and the ballpoint pen, I guess get out your quill and parchment.

The fact is, we built the modern world — from television to hip hop, running shoes to airplanes — and the rest of the world can pretend they believe that our education system is worse than theirs or that all Americans are somehow both fat and lazy and also overworked and too intense (we always seem to embody every possible contradiction to international minds), but the fact is, the world they live in is the one we built.

I like to play a little game when I watch international film and TV. It’s not a drinking game, because alcohol poisoning is not on my list of top three ways to die (they are, in order: dinosaurs, solo trip to Mars, or, most likely, saying "bitch please" to some man waving a gun in my face while trying to tell me what to do).

Anyway, I like to yell out "ours!" anytime anything American shows up. Try it. You’ll miss a lot of dialogue.

From the shoes they lace up in the morning to the tiny little Fords they drive across town, from the smartphones glued to their hands to the music blasting through their earbuds, from the memes they share to the movies they watch and the vaccines that saved their lives — we imagined it, we built it, we exported it.

You don’t have to like us. But you are living in a world shaped, inescapably, by us.

I once read that being American is an attitude more than a geography, and I think that’s true. That’s why so many people around the world see themselves in this country and want to move here. And don’t think those days are gone. I’ve been to Europe twice this year and both times I was just as inundated with questions from Uber drivers and bartenders about how one could move to America as I was before fewer than half of us elected an orange dictator.

I recently saw a video of an American guy traveling somewhere abroad who made a quick video saying it’s a good reminder for Americans that if you get up at 6am to jog in [whichever country he was in], you won’t be able to find an open coffee shop.

The comments were full of Europeans lambasting Americans for, get this, waking up early.

God forbid that the people of the nation that invented the COVID vaccine, holds the second highest number of patents on the planet, and, oh yeah, pays the vast majority of NATO’s budget, may want to wake up early.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest in the ‘90s, a time when Amazon, Boeing, Starbucks, Apple, and everything dot com was being built in our backyard. We grew up thinking that everyone started a business in their garage and turned it into an empire that funded school field trips to the Seattle Art Museum.

When Paul Allen built the Experience Music Project to honor Jimi Hendrix, the message was clear: Jimi was awesome, but a startup entrepreneur built his museum.

There are so many negatives to the idea of manifest destiny but the idea that we should be bold, take risks, explore beyond our known boundaries, and dream bigger than anyone imagined is what made us the country we are

We are, at our core, a nation of dreamers and hard workers who truly believe, very often to our own detriment, that if we just dream big enough and work hard enough, we can build a new world.

And we believe it because we’ve seen it, over and over and over again, right here.

The lightbulb. Air conditioning. Rock and roll. The microchip. Netflix. The personal computer. Basketball. Jazz. Hollywood. Email. The internet. Wi-Fi. GPS. The polio vaccine. The heart-lung machine. Refrigerators. 3D printing. Even the humble but mighty chocolate chip cookie.

Is this to say that no other country every invented anything? Obviously not. But can you think of any other country that has contributed even half as much to the modern world as we have that gets anywhere near the unbridled hatred that we do?

No you cannot.

So sneer at us all you want. But you'll have to do it while scrolling through your smartphone, in your denim jeans, wearing your Nikes, sipping your Starbucks, listening to hip hop, preparing your PowerPoint presentation, and Googling what other things we invented that you didn't even realize were ours.

You're welcome.

Kat