Where are you from?

A simple question with complex consequences

Hi, I’m Matt, and welcome to Steady Beats: a newsletter examining big ideas from books you’ll love.

Where are you from?

A simple question. But like everything else in modern life, the answer is complicated.

As are the implications.

I know a wise Australian, well-traveled, who observed that Americans are not so much from a country as a state. In a country so vast, a home state provides a more reasonably-sized anchor to which Americans can affix our origin stories and identity.

Drake Greene

made a good observation on a recent post of mine in which I mentioned my wife and I are considering a move from Florida back to our native Michigan. Drake wrote:

… we grapple with a similar conundrum - are we New Englanders or Floridians, and how should we plan the future?

Even after 23 years in Florida I am still very much a Michigander. (Albeit one who despises a Michigan February … and most of March … and a surprising amount of April. Winter is long.)

When people ask where I’m from, I always say “Michigan, but I live in Florida.”

Tampa today arguably isn’t “The South” in a traditional cultural sense — immigrants from the north and northeastern US and many foreign nations have created a mishmash of traditions, perspectives, and celebrations that are anything but uniformly Southern. And yet there remain strains of Southern culture that feel foreign to me even after all these years.

Some are little things.

Like kids calling adults “Mr., or “Ms.” followed by your first name, not your last. Using an adult’s first name was an unthinkable breach of etiquette in my northern youth, but here, the honorific + first name equation is a sign of respect.

Some differences are larger, literally and figuratively.

For example: the giant, sun-obscuring, and obnoxious confederate flag that sometimes flies on private property adjacent to Interstate 75. I can’t understand having pride in the South’s stand in the Civil War, both morally (reprehensible) and militarily (demolished and defeated).

Florida is home, but it isn’t quite … home, you know?

Do you feel a loyalty and sense of identity to the place you were born? Not everyone does. The world has plenty of happy expats, both in the traditional sense—settling in new countries—and this interstate expat situation we have inside the United States.

Do people fully content in new places still feel a tug of loyalty to their point of origin? Maybe they are better adjusted and evolved than me. More adaptable. Less nostalgic.

Culture differences at the state level ingrain themselves in other ways, also. Education, for one.

I doubt, for example, that in elementary school, you learned the lyrics to Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald,” about a ship that sinks in Lake Superior.

I did.

And when it came to learning about the Civil War, the prevailing theme in my northern education was clear and blunt: North good, South bad.

That lens still works, though I’d modify it to, “North flawed, but on the right side, South plastering economics and pride over a morally repugnant position.”

That sense of home, of our origin story as set in geography, served as the filter through which I consumed Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest, his latest in a long line of captivating history books. In “Demon,” the book centers on Fort Sumter in South Carolina as the flashpoint for start of the Civil War.

As the nation cracked apart, many people had to choose sides, examining and sometimes altering their personal stories about where they were from and where their loyalty resided.

Were they from the United States first and foremost? Or from their native Southern state? Could a sense of heritage and family override the duty to choose the right side in the conflict?

Larson’s book details several people who had to make these decisions. For some, the choice was easy, as it was for secessionist Edmund Ruffin from Virginia:

“In South Carolina, Ruffin found himself appreciated in a way he had never felt in Virginia; he was captivated by the state, where he found his own secessionist impulses echoed by Hammond and a cadre of radical politicians. Charleston in particular appealed to him.”

For others, like Robert E. Lee, the choice was agonizing:

“For Lee this was a wrenching moment. He considered slavery “a moral and political evil” and looked upon secession “as anarchy.” Writing to Blair, he said, ‘If I owned the four million slaves in the South I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?’”

The choices they made shaped their destinies.

Thankfully, the stakes are lower today when we contemplate where we are from and where we belong. But the question still matters. It influences our identity, the stories we tell about—and to—ourselves, and the paths we choose.

Where are you from, really? How does this shape who you are and where you're headed?

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You can dive deeper into “The Demon of Unrest” with a review and key ideas, here.

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Thank you for reading Steady Beats #249.