The Club I Thought I’d Joined

On Belonging, Betrayal, and the Discipline of Staying Awake

I was eight years old when my parents gently woke me just after midnight on July 21st, 1969. We were on holiday at Butlin’s in Minehead, and the day before had been full of that loose-limbed childhood freedom—the kind that leaves you sun-tired and glowing. Butlin’s was the closest thing the UK had to a theme park back then: a sprawling wonderland of fairgrounds, repertory theatre, go-karts, dry ski slopes, talent shows, and beauty competitions—all accessible with your room key. It was freedom dressed up as fun, and it gave me my first taste of possibility: kids roamed safely, laughter echoed from every direction, and every day felt like its own small adventure.

Now, in the hush of early morning, something extraordinary was unfolding—both half a world away and on another world entirely. We walked to a nearby hall where families had gathered around a flickering black-and-white television. The image was grainy and spectral, but unmistakable: the lunar module had landed. Hours later, we watched as Neil Armstrong stepped down a fragile ladder and placed a booted foot on the surface of the moon.

In that moment, it felt like anything was possible. And most of all, it felt American. All the space stuff I loved—the rockets, the astronauts, the sheer boldness of it—was real. America wasn’t just where the action was. It was the dream.

I was part of the Thunderbirds generation, raised on futuristic puppets and Cold War courage. But that night, something shifted. America wasn’t just a character in the stories—it was the author. The dreamer. The doer. So when, at thirty-four, I was offered the chance to move to the United States with my family, I didn’t hesitate. After a childhood spent dreaming from afar, I was being invited into the story itself—a country I believed I could join in both name and spirit. I grabbed it with both hands.

Years before I became a U.S. citizen—probably around 2000, before the world changed—I found myself in a corporate multicultural awareness workshop. One of those initiatives that rarely promise much and even less often deliver. But this one did.

Over several days, we were asked to confront a version of American history I’d never truly been shown: the Trail of Tears, Japanese internment, Jim Crow, mass deportations, redlining. These weren’t aberrations. They were architecture.

What stayed with me wasn’t just the history—it was the reaction. Many of the older white men in the room were from plant sites in the Deep South, and I’d seen some of that regional polarization firsthand. Traveling through that part of the country, I’d sensed how certain cracks in the American story had been papered over. In that workshop, those cracks widened. Arms crossed. Jokes muttered. Not just resistance to new information, but to the idea that the story they’d always believed might not be the whole one.

And me? I wasn’t just learning history. I was learning who could bear to hear it—and who couldn’t. It was like hearing the floorboards creak beneath the story I thought I’d been standing on. It left me changed—no longer able to sleepwalk through the story I’d wanted to believe.

I told myself it was just a few people. That we were still moving forward. That the arc still bent. And I reminded myself of other rooms I’d been in—rooms filled with hope, and people doing the work—even if I was still on the margins, not yet a citizen, waiting for my place in the story.

That belief flickered again a few years later, during Obama’s first presidential campaign. I thought of Pennsylvania, just over the Delaware border, where I knocked on doors in neighborhoods that didn’t see many volunteers. I couldn’t vote. But I could knock. And I believed we were ready to choose a president not for the color of his skin, but for his clarity, his calm, his vision. Becoming a citizen under President Obama felt like an affirmation—not that we were perfect, but that we were moving. That I was joining something worthy.

And then, we weren’t.

Trump’s first presidency didn’t feel like politics. It felt like performance art laced with menace. A man with no reverence for anything but himself bulldozed through every institution—and much of the country applauded.

I had been at Hillary Clinton’s final rally in Philadelphia the night before the election. Springsteen. Bon Jovi. The Obamas. The crowd was electric. It didn’t feel like politics either—but for all the right reasons. We weren’t just casting votes; we were bearing witness to what felt like the natural continuation of progress.

The next morning, it was as if someone had pulled the plug on the country. Even the light felt off, as if the air had stopped moving.

I told myself it was an aberration. That the system would correct. But then came COVID, and the air thickened with chaos. Instead of compassion, there was cruelty. Instead of clarity, confusion. Instead of shared grief, politicized loss. And still, he remained untouched.

When Biden won, it felt like the nation exhaled—not in joy, but in sheer relief. The volume lowered. The sentences made sense again. There was decency. But not urgency. And that, I realized, was the problem. He waited too long. He trusted too much. He listened to the voices telling him what he wanted to hear: Only you, Joe. Only you can beat him.

By the time my hope shifted—to Harris and Waltz, to the possibility of something fresh, decisive, urgent—it was already too late. That future had slipped away. Hope, once again, had outpaced reality.

Trump didn’t fade. Like a Roy Cohn resurrection, he refused to retreat, refused to concede, refused to answer to the law—and the institutions meant to hold him did the same. That felt like betrayal, not just of country, but of the contract I thought citizenship carried.

Years later, I’m still trying to make sense of the country I waited thirteen years to join. The one I believed was writing a story I could belong to. Maybe it was. Or maybe I loved the story more than the truth.

But I stay. I stay because I believe in the reckoning. Because I refuse the seduction of forgetting. I no longer pledge allegiance to the myth, but to the truth beneath it. To the work of remembering. Of speaking. Of bearing witness.

Maybe that’s what citizenship means now—not blind faith in the light, but the discipline of seeing in the dark.

And I remember what I saw that night in Minehead: a room full of strangers, all looking up. Maybe that’s still what we’re meant to do—look up, even when the picture fades to static. Even when the dream turns out to be more talent show than transformation. Even when the club isn’t quite what it claimed to be.