Born in the USA: Freedom of Speech Is an Invitation to Get Curious

It was the fall of 1998 when a new acoustic version of Born in the USA was released. It was a resurgence of a song written in 1982 in the shadow of Vietnam and its aftermath. Returning veterans who came home not to parades but to silence, unemployment, and a country that had moved on - leaving them behind. The narrator in Springsteen's song is not celebrating America. He's asking, with a kind of desperate irony, what exactly being born here got him.

But you'd never know that from the chorus alone.

In 1998, I was a sophomore in love with music history — the kind where you listen to a song and reach for an encyclopedia to find the current events that fertilized the lyrics. I was convinced there were hidden answers inside the lyrics, and I was hell-bent on finding them. Simon & Garfunkel's The Sound of Silence, recorded in the shadow of JFK's assassination. Don McLean's American Pie mourning the day the music died: Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper. Led Zeppelin and their quest for the ring. CCR's Fortunate Son, the Animals’ House of the Rising Sun, or U2 Sunday Bloody Sunday. What fertilized the ground that made those songs possible?

Context doesn't just explain a song. It is the song, if you're willing to go looking for it.

I had already proven myself a little counter-culture leaning. A few years earlier in junior high, I'd written an essay on the American Dream — dystopian, honest, well-penned according to my teacher — and yet it got pulled by the school’s submission committee for being too controversial. So by the time my American Studies class (history, literature, and art taught together, which was basically my personal obsession finally getting a grade) put Born in the USA up for discussion, I was primed.

The teacher asked how many students had heard the song in its entirety. Nearly every hand went up. We listened to a few verses. Then: what is this song about?

The answer, from the overwhelming majority of the class, was that it was a pro-patriotic anthem. A celebration of being American.

I sat there genuinely confused — not in a superior way, but surprised. These were smart district 203 students. We had listened to the same song. We just hadn't heard the same thing. And when we only experience the surface of something, we miss the entire conversation underneath it.

Freedom of Speech Is an Invitation to Get Curious

Here's what I've come to believe, two decades later: freedom of speech is not just a right. It's an invitation.

It's an invitation to be curious. To take the thing that sounds one way and wonder if it might mean another. To seek out a perspective that doesn't confirm what you already think. To listen to a song — or read a historical book, or examine a policy, or sit with someone whose life looks nothing like yours — and say, tell me more.

Springsteen wrote a song that sounds, on the surface, like a celebration with its catchy tempo, upbeat cry for being born here. But if you get curious, if you listen past the anthemic chorus to the verses, if you place the song in its historical context, if you ask why a Vietnam era draftee might sing those words with that much defiance - you find something much richer. You find the complexity of what it actually means to be born here.

That complexity is not a threat to patriotism. It is patriotism, in its most honest form. Springsteen understood it — you can love something and rage at it simultaneously. You can fist-pump and grieve in the same breath. It's the belief that this country is worth the conversation. Worth the examination. Worth asking whether we're evolving our beliefs.

The Rebel Inheritance

I'll own something here: I was born to question things — possibly a gift of being born in the USA. But my grandparents, on my mom's side, only ever experienced a half-life of that freedom. They were rebels fighting against an oppressor who worked systematically to bury Irish culture, language, and pride. Freedom of speech is a right they survived without — and then, upon immigrating here in the 1940s, had to slowly learn to trust. You don't unlearn that vigilance overnight. The repatterning runs deep. And so I inherited the instinct to question from people who had spent a lifetime learning to hide it, like hands in a pocket.

It wasn't until I found my way into Irish history, literature, and the Irish Times that I started to understand the distance between Irish and Irish-American. And I got curious about something that still sits with me: how can so many Irish-Americans be comfortable with the mistreatment of citizens and immigrants today — having been exactly that, within living memory, within this family? Isn't it strange how quickly a people can forget the struggle? The fight? The rebuilding of identity in a new country?

It feels like my parents have quietly abandoned a belief system that I was only just picking up — dusting it off, turning it over, finding it still intact. Rooted back into the family history through my own sense of wonder. Curiosity doesn’t just find the old things your people left behind - it asks whether they’re worth carrying forward.

Curiosity is the dividing line. Real curiosity asks was this right? Who did this hurt? What did this cost someone else? At the macro and most microscopic level - is another human being.

Leaving It Better Than You Found It

The joy in Born in the USA, that fist-pump energy and driving riff, I don't think it's accidental. I think Springsteen understood something about optimism that gets lost when we reduce the song.

The optimism is in the asking. The belief that we can do better, be better, build better is the most American impulse there is. Not the blind pride that says make us great again —  that’s using a rearview mirror for a road map. A backslide disguised as ambition. It says the best version has already happened. Curiosity says we haven’t built it yet. But the restless, sometimes angry, always hopeful conviction that we’re not done yet, that’s where the real anthem lies — in fields of Athenry.

This country is full of diverse people with wildly different lived experiences. Not just the obvious diversity of race, religion, gender, but the texture of how we've each moved through our lives. What we've survived. What we've been denied. What we've been handed. What we had to fight for. We don't get curious enough about each other's versions of this place.

And when I think about what I want to leave behind — for the next generation, for the people coming up after me — I don't want them to inherit my struggles unchanged. I want the infrastructure to be better. The social support to be stronger. The conversation to change from this “winners and losers” mentality to collaboration. We’re in this together. We find ourselves here, in this moment, from vastly different starting points - pilgrimage, slavery, indentured servants; for religious and political freedom, hopeful wealth, love, or adoption. Can we learn from each other to build a more hopeful supportive place?

That's what it means to me to be born here.

Get curious. Listen past the chorus. That's where the real song lives.