Dear USA: When You Were Awesome

A letter to America from the boy in western Sydney who was once your biggest fan

You might be cool, but you’ll never be purple safari suit cool.

I was 5 years old at Saint Mary’s South Primary School when I first fell in love with you.

Her name was Miss Hess. Blonde hair. An accent I’d never heard before in my whole short life. I remember her standing at the front of our kindergarten classroom and being absolutely mesmerised. I asked her where she was from. She told me she was from the United States of America. Somewhere down south. Alabama, maybe. I don’t remember exactly. I didn’t even know what a United States even was at the time. What I remember is the way the words came out of her mouth. The roll and lilt and warmth of them. They sounded like the films we’d already started watching. They sounded like everything good.

A 5-year-old in western Sydney doesn’t have the words for “I am infatuated with my kindergarten teacher because she’s from a magical place.” But I was. Completely. And from that moment, you had me.

That’s how it started. With a blonde American lady at the front of a New South Wales classroom, telling a barefoot Aussie kid about the country she’d come from.

You can build the rest of a life on a foundation that small. I did.

Because you were the greatest country on the face of the bloody earth. Everyone knew it. Everyone said it. The dream was to go there one day. To stand under the Statue of Liberty and look up. To stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon and look down. To walk over the Golden Gate Bridge. To get a photo at the Empire State Building. To lose your shirt at a Las Vegas card table. To take your kids to Disneyland. To eat a hot dog in Times Square.

You sent us Hollywood and we ate it whole. You sent us Indiana Jones and Marty McFly and Han Solo. You sent us Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin. You sent us the moon landing on grainy footage and we watched it in school assemblies. We were hypnotised by the technologically of an advanced civilisation as if we were still rubbing two sticks together trying to discover fire.

When Crocodile Dundee went to New York, I went with him. Every Aussie kid did. We sat in our lounge rooms half a world away and walked the streets through Mick’s eyes and the whole thing felt close enough to touch. Like maybe one day, we’d get there too.

When I was a teenager, my uncle bought a Rambler Matador. Big American sedan. Chrome you could see your face in. Then a Rambler X. Big two-door coupe. He called it the big American job and I’d run my hand down the panels like I was touching a piece of the country itself. I felt so proud sitting up in that front seat turning heads everywhere we’d go.

He’d go to Vegas every chance he got. Come back with stories. The casinos. The lights. The buffets the size of a school hall. The way the air conditioning hit you when you walked into a hotel lobby. The way the dealers called you sir. The way the whole place seemed to exist on a scale Australia couldn’t compete with.

I’d sit there as a teenager and listen to him with the same wide-eyed awe a 5-year-old had for Miss Hess. You were still the dream. Still the place. Still everything good and big and possible. The richest people on the face of the earth. Wall Street. Manhattan. Texas. California. The kind of country a kid from western Sydney could only get to by saving every coin for a decade.

Friends would come back from their own trips with their own stories and I’d absorb every one of them. The skyline at night. The redwoods. The size of a steak. The taste of a Coke from a glass bottle. You were a country, and you were also a feeling, and you were also a promise.

And then one Tuesday morning your towers fell.

I remember exactly where I was. I remember the heaviness in my chest that didn’t lift all day. I remember the pounding headache that wouldn’t quit. I remember feeling physically ill in a way I couldn’t put words to, because what I was feeling wasn’t shock or fear, it was grief. The grief of a kid watching the older brother he idolised get sucker-punched on live television.

We watched the people jumping. We watched the firefighters running in. We watched a country built on optimism take the worst hit of its history. And we cried for you. Not the polite kind of crying. The proper, shoulder-shaking, can’t-believe-this-is-happening kind.

We had our own dead in those towers too. Australians who were just there for work, for love, for a long weekend. They died with your dead and we mourned them together.

It was the Musketeer thing. All for one. One for all. That’s what we were to you and that’s what we believed you were to us.

And when you went to war, we went with you. Bush invaded Iraq on the back of a lie about weapons of mass destruction and somewhere deep down a lot of us knew it was a stretch. But the wound of 9/11 was still raw and we were not going to leave our mate alone in a dark room. So we went.

Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Three of the bastards. Wars you started. Half of which were wrong before the first boot hit the dirt.

But we didn’t cut. We didn’t run. We sent our blokes, our brothers, our dads, our cousins, our schoolmates, to fight beside yours. We buried our diggers under flag-draped coffins. Long Tan. Tarin Kowt. The whole bloody mess of it. We stood with you because that’s what mates are meant to do. Even when you’d fucked it up. Even when the cause was wrong. We showed up.

Because that’s what the little boy at Saint Mary’s South had been taught to do. That America was worth dying beside. That the bond was real.

But somewhere along the way, you started losing your mind in public.

It happened gradually at first. The kid from the kindergarten classroom, now a grown man, didn’t notice it straight away. He noticed Hollywood went a bit dark. He noticed your news started screaming. He noticed your politicians stopped looking like leaders and started looking like grifters. He noticed your churches got loud and your guns got louder. He noticed the kids getting shot in their classrooms while you did nothing. He noticed Charlottesville. He noticed Ferguson. He noticed the slow grinding way you couldn’t seem to fix the things you used to be so proud of fixing.

The boy from Miss Hess’s kindergarten was watching his older brother slowly come apart on the kitchen floor.

And then you elected him. Twice.

A man found liable in your own courts for sexual abuse. An adjudicated rapist. A convicted felon. An insurrectionist who sent a mob to murder his own vice president and then watched it on the telly with a Diet Coke. A thrice-bankrupt steakhouse hustler. A spray-tanned pardoner of pedophiles who took his pen, once back in the Oval Office, and walked rapists and child abusers out of prison because they wore the right hat on the right day.

This is who 77 million of you chose. Not once. Not Twice. Third time the charm. With more votes the second time than the first.

The boy from Saint Mary’s South could not believe it. Refused to believe it the first time. Wept the second.

And how did this bloke repay the country that bled beside you for half a bloody century? He pissed and shit all over the free trade deal we’d signed in good faith. Slapped tariffs on Australia. On Canada. On Britain. On every mate who’d showed up when it mattered.

After Long Tan. After Tarin Kowt. After every coffin we sent home from a war you started. He treated us like an enemy.

And then he set about the rest of the world. Threatened to annex Canada like it was a Monopoly square. Threatened Greenland. Belittled prime ministers in the Oval Office on camera. Disparaged NATO. Cuddled up to Putin while telling Ukraine they were on their own. Shook down friends. Rewarded dictators.

The little boy who loved you would not have recognised the country you’ve become. He would have closed his picture book and asked Miss Hess where the real America had gone.

But before I go any further, I need to say this clearly. Because there’s a version of this letter that lumps every single one of you in together, and that version is not just unfair, it’s wrong.

I am not talking to the critical-thinking Americans.

I am not talking to the millions who saw this coming and tried to stop it. I am not talking to the women who marched in Washington. I am not talking to the unions. I am not talking to the teachers showing up in red states to teach actual history. I am not talking to the lawyers fighting this in court. I am not talking to the doctors quietly performing the procedures you’ve made illegal. I am not talking to the journalists getting fired for telling the truth.

I am not talking to Jimmy Kimmel. I am not talking to Stephen Colbert. I am not talking to Seth Meyers and John Oliver and Jimmy Fallon. I sit on the other side of the Pacific and I watch your monologues at 8 o’clock in the morning over a long black and I laugh and I cry and I say out loud to Mitzy, “These bastards still get it. These bastards are still in the fight.”

You critical-thinking Americans, you are not the country I’m writing this letter to. You are the country I still love. You are the country Miss Hess told me about, before things went sideways. You are the version of America the little boy in the kindergarten classroom was infatuated with. You haven’t gone anywhere. You’re still in there, fighting like buggery, and I love you for it.

I’m with you. The rest of the world is with you. We see you. We hear you. We feel your pain. We are not turning our backs on you.

But we are turning our backs on the 77 million.

We are turning our backs on the brain-dead imbeciles. The Fox-marinated cousins. The QAnon mothers. The church-going hypocrites with the gun safe in the rec room. The Confederate-flag-flying pensioners. The silent-majority golf-cart Republicans who knew exactly what he was and voted for him anyway. The 77 million fucking morons who looked at a man bragging about grabbing women by the pussy and a list of 30-something felony convictions and said yes, this bloke, this one, this is the one I want running the country my children will inherit.

And yes. The good Americans are going to suffer too. The tariffs will hit your blue-state retirees. The recession will hit your union households. The collapse of soft power will hit your students abroad. We know that. We don’t want that. It breaks our hearts. But there is no version of the world’s response that punishes only the guilty and spares only the innocent.

We’re all suffering. We’re all going to keep suffering. And if it takes the rest of the world turning its back to make the 77 million finally understand what they have done, then so be it.

We have tried polite. We have tried diplomatic. We have tried hand-wringing. None of it has worked.

So the world is going to send the only message left. Withdrawal of trade. Withdrawal of trust. Withdrawal of admiration. Withdrawal of immigration. Withdrawal of tourism. Withdrawal of the assumption that you are the leader of the free world. The kind of message that gets through skulls thicker than two short planks.

And it might, just might, drag a few of the lazy non-voters off the couch next time. The ones who weren’t going to vote for him but couldn’t be arsed voting for anyone else. The ones who let this happen by sitting it out. Maybe when they see how bad it gets, they’ll find their way to a polling booth in 2026 and 2028 and actually fucking do their bit.

And there’s one more thing I want to say, and it’s to the Democrats.

When you win it back, and you will, you have to actually fucking fix it this time.

You don’t get to go back to the way things were. You don’t get to coast on the relief of him being gone. You don’t get to spend the next 4 years patting yourselves on the back for being the adults in the room.

Because what made him possible was 40 years of neoliberal rot. 40 years of offshoring. 40 years of stagnant wages. 40 years of healthcare bankruptcies. 40 years of pretending trickle-down was real economics and not a hostage note from the donor class. The germination of Trumpism is in the soil you helped till. You and the Republicans both, but you, the Democrats, were supposed to be the bulwark, and you sold out to the same donors and now here we are.

So when you get the keys back, you have to dig the rot out. Tax the bastards. Break up the monopolies. Fund the schools. Cancel the medical debt. Build the housing. Stop pretending Wall Street is the economy and Main Street is just there to applaud.

And throw a shitload of motherfuckers in prison.

Him. His cabinet. The lawyers who helped. The senators who looked the other way. The donors who funded the coup attempt. The judges who shielded him. Build the cages and fill them. And keep them in there, year after year, in their orange jumpsuits, so that the next would-be Trump, and there will be a next one, knows exactly what is waiting for him at the end of the road.

Accountability is not optional. Accountability is the only vaccine.

The grief is the worst part. Not the rage. The grief.

It’s the grief of a man in the Blue Mountains who used to be a 5-year-old in Miss Hess’s kindergarten, sitting at his desk, trying to explain to his readers why the country he grew up loving is now the country he can’t bear to watch. It’s the grief of an older brother going off the rails and not being able to drag him back. It’s the grief of watching the Statue of Liberty become a hollow joke. It’s the grief of watching Captain America turn into the bloke he was created to fight.

You used to be awesome. You really did. And we loved you for it. Not as a satellite state. Not as a junior partner. As a friend. As a mate. As something close to family.

But the little boy is grown now. And the older brother has lost the plot.

So the rest of us, the Aussies, the Kiwis, the Canadians, the Europeans, the Japanese, the South Koreans, all the kids who used to look up to you, we’ve had to grow up too. We’ve had to become the adults in the room. We have to hold the line on democratic norms. We have to keep climate policy alive. We have to stand with Ukraine. We have to defend the rules-based order that you wrote and are now spitting on.

The student has become the teacher because the teacher has had a stroke and is yelling at the wheelie bins.

And it breaks my fucking heart. It really does. Because somewhere in me there is still a 5-year-old at Saint Mary’s South Primary School, looking up at a blonde American kindergarten teacher with stars in his eyes, wanting you to come back. Wanting Miss Hess to be from a country I still admire. Wanting the McDonald’s and the moon landing and the Bruce Springsteen songs to belong to the country I loved. Wanting Captain America to be a hero again. Wanting to look up.

But the boy is a man now. And the man is sad. And the country he grew up loving is gone.

We will love what you used to be for as long as we can remember it. And we will mourn what you’ve become for the rest of our lives.

And when you come back to us, if you come back to us, we will be here. Heartbroken. Tired. Older. But still your mates. Because in the end, that is what we are.

We just need you to come back. We miss you.

IFLA ~ Gman

Aussie-to-Yank Glossary

Saint Mary’s South Primary School - A small Catholic primary school in western Sydney. The kind of place where a 5-year-old in 1970s Australia first encountered an American accent and lost his head over it.

Western Sydney - The sprawling working-class suburbs west of the harbour. Where many Aussie kids grew up dreaming of America. The opposite of the postcard Sydney with the bridge and the opera house. The real one.

The Blue Mountains - The sandstone range immediately west of Sydney. Where some of those western Sydney kids grew up to become men who write angry letters about what America became.

Rambler Matador - American Motors Corporation sedan and coupe of the 1970s. Imported into Australia by people who wanted a piece of the dream parked in their driveway.

Long black - An espresso poured over hot water. Functionally similar to an Americano. The fuel of the Aussie commentariat at 8am while Stephen Colbert plays on the laptop.

Mum - Mother. Always “mum,” never “mom.”

Telly - The television. Where most of us first met America.

Bloke - A man. A regular fella. Used here for our own war dead and for the convicted felon who betrayed them.

Mate - More than “friend.” A code. An obligation. What we are to each other when it matters.

Diggers - Australian soldiers. The name goes back to Gallipoli and the trenches of the First World War. Carries enormous weight. Not used lightly.

Long Tan - A battle in Vietnam, August 1966. 108 Australian soldiers held off a force ten times their size in a rubber plantation. 18 Aussies killed. Burnt into the national memory.

Tarin Kowt - Forward operating base in Uruzgan province, Afghanistan. Home of the Australian deployment for over a decade. The place from which too many of our diggers came home in flag-draped coffins.

Cut and run - To abandon a fight. To leave your mates in the lurch. The thing Australia did not do.

Wheelie bin - A wheeled rubbish bin. “Yelling at the wheelie bins” is what your granddad does when he loses the plot.

Fighting like buggery - Fighting hard. Fighting with everything you’ve got. A term of approval, not criticism.

Couldn’t be arsed - Couldn’t be bothered. Used here for the non-voters who let this happen.

Bloody - The Australian salt. Sprinkled liberally on everything.

Vegemite - A yeast-based spread. National icon. You either grew up on it or you cannot understand us.