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Outside looking in
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Posted on Jan 13 2012
The United States of America is a great nation. Great in its ambition to continually improve. Driven by a “don’t-waste-time” attitude. Keeping the time and clock firmly within one’s awareness. At the same time, to be American is to also be aware of how people are wonderfully different and how they accept each other for those differences, and ultimately treat each other with dignity and respect (sometimes much easier said than done).
Truth be told, I am a person looking in from the outside, in the sense that I am Yapese and a citizen of the Federated States of Micronesia. From my perspective, living in America most of my life, countless Americans of all walks of life and abilities exemplify this dual-sided, ying yang way of being independent, and at the same time, being compassionate toward each other. From Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to women’s voting rights to the Civil Rights Act and now the Americans with Disabilities Act, Americans continue to progress toward bettering the world by seeing injustice, acknowledging the wrong, and finally doing something about it. This realization of the dualism in being American goes hand in hand with the island style of living here where we are all together as one family at one fiesta and, although times are hard, we are harder!
As part of a disability rights organization, the Northern Marianas Protection and Advocacy Systems Inc. a.k.a. NMPASI, I see great things in 2012 for our people with disabilities because of this attitude to progress. So with the welcoming of 2012, we should also ask ourselves, as U.S. and non-U.S. citizens, how we in our own way can help better our islands that we call home. Sometimes with an outside perspective, we can step back and see what we have been missing, but has been here all along. Happy new year, CNMI!
Thomas Thornburgh
Projects Specialist, NMPASI
