07.05.26 The media didn’t show them, but THEY MET US! by Freddy

A dear old friend shared this article about America. He said:

It’s the best thing I read in a long time. It breaks the spell cast on us by the news media and social media. It is long but it is uplifting and revealing. The message is, don’t miss the real world, the ordinary, your neighbor, even your friend.

They Met Us

Of everything a German soccer fan saw crossing this country, the thing he flew home talking about wasn’t the Grand Canyon.

It was a waitress at a Waffle House in a small town outside Atlanta.

His name is Freddy. He drove coast to coast this summer and posted about it every day, and I got hooked on following him. If you listen to Freddy describe a plate of hash browns, you’d think he was standing at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.

I’ll admit something. I’m not much of a soccer fan. But this summer I couldn’t stop watching, and it had nothing to do with the games. It was the people. Strangers from the other side of the world, wandering through our ordinary Tuesday, and losing their minds over it.

There’s a woman I keep thinking about too. Some local reporter stuck a microphone in her face outside a gas station near Nashville and asked what she thought of America. She’s got an ICEE sweating in her hand, still wearing her country’s jersey from the night before, and she just says it plain.

“This isn’t the country they showed us.”

Because for a year before she got on that plane, they’d told her what we were. Dangerous. Divided. Coming apart at the seams. A place to watch your back in, if you were foolish enough to come at all.

Then she landed. And somewhere between the airport and a stranger holding a door because her arms were full, the country she’d been warned about stopped matching the one standing in front of her.

That fella who held the door wasn’t a greeter. Nobody was paying him. He was just somebody a lot like you.

You did something like that this week. Held a door, maybe. Waved a car through. Told a stranger to get home safe and forgot about it before you reached your own car.

You didn’t think anything of it. But somebody might carry it the rest of their life.

Nobody told you that you were representing America. That’s probably why you did it so well.

Here’s the part I can’t shake. For some people, you are America. The only one they’ll ever meet. Whatever you do in front of them, that’s the whole country to them, for the rest of their life.

And I think that’s the thing we forgot.

We’ve lived here so long we stopped seeing it. It’s like your own kids. You’re with them every single day, so you don’t notice them growing, until one afternoon an old photo falls out of a drawer and knocks the wind out of you. Same house. Same country. You just quit looking.

It took strangers to see it for us.

It took a man from Japan sitting down at a Mexican place, watching them set chips and salsa in front of him before he’d ordered a thing. Free. Back home, he wrote, a gift like that comes with a debt. Here it just came with the table. He ate three baskets out of what he called honor, and said by the time his food came he’d been defeated by a courtesy. Millions of people read it. And somewhere out there is a woman who set those chips down without breaking her sentence, no idea she’s famous halfway around the world.

It took a busload of Scottish fans in a little pub in Boston, standing on chairs with their arms around each other, belting out “Country Roads” at the top of their lungs. Not some Scottish song. John Denver. Take me home. A room full of Scotsmen singing our song back to us, and half of us don’t even hear it anymore.

And it took Freddy. Six weeks in a car with a German flag on the roof, a map thrown across the hood, driving through towns he’d only ever seen on a screen, filming his own face every time something plain and ordinary knocked him flat.

Out of all of it, the thing he carried home was her.

She worked the overnight shift. By his second visit she had his order memorized, called it back to the kitchen without writing a word, and slid a hot plate in front of a man from the other side of the earth like she’d known him her whole life. Filled his coffee before he thought to ask. She figured she was just working a shift.

She was carrying the whole country on her shoulders and nobody ever told her.

They came here to see America.

Instead, they met her. And they met you.

Now think about how she got so invisible to the rest of us. Every night, somebody in a control room picks the fire over the family reunion, the shouting match over the Little League game. They point the camera at our worst eleven seconds and tell the world that’s the whole movie. That’s how a stranger ends up scared of us before she’s ever met one of us. Fear sells. A waitress refilling coffee doesn’t. And after enough years of it, a lot of people overseas got sold a country that was never real.

And if we’re honest, so did a lot of us.

Somewhere along the line we started apologizing for loving the place. Picked up the idea that you’ve got to list everything wrong with it before you’re allowed to say what’s right.

You don’t have to pretend it’s perfect to love it. You never did.

And none of that noise survives one plate of hash browns at one in the morning.

They’re flying home now, most of them. And here’s the thing about the ones who leave.

A tourist takes pictures.

A witness comes home with a story.

We just sent thousands of witnesses home. And every one of them saw a country the rest of us had quit noticing a long time ago.

Nobody appointed them. Nobody paid them. They just ate at our counters and sang in our streets and figured out the place they’d been warned about was warmer than anybody told them. I’ve got a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot more of them.

Because a country doesn’t get its name from its headlines. It gets it from its strangers. And you are somebody’s stranger every single day.

So here’s the only thing I’ll ask.

Tomorrow, remember her. And remember that somebody out there is going to decide what they believe about this whole place based on nothing more than how you treat them in the next five minutes.

One day your grandkids are going to ask what this country was like. And maybe the best answer won’t come out of a history book.

It’ll come from a witness.

Somewhere tonight, a family in another country is laughing about a stranger who held a door. A woman who called them “hon.” A kid at a register who looked them in the eye and actually meant it.

They don’t know your name. They never will.

But they’ll remember your country. Because they remembered your kindness.

And maybe that’s how it was always supposed to work.

One ordinary person at a time. 🇺🇸

Thanks Randy for sharing this very meaningful, eye opening article!

Rosalyn’s note: We Americans live in the best country on earth and Jerry figured that out while touring the USA. If all you hear is the national news and what is broadcast to other countries you would never know that.

While traveling through America when I first started this blog we saw all the goodness, kindness, generosity and love this country has to offer. We were so proud of our country and proud to be Americans.

The good people of our country shine brightly when you meet us in person. The news doesn’t convey that America to folks in other countries and sadly to our own country.

Let’s keep being the “real” Americans that Freddy met in his travels and let others see who the majority of us really are!