nader akhnoukh

Today I Became a US Citizen

I’ve lived here for 20 years. Three years learning who I was in Northern Massachussetts, four building life long friends in the woods of New Hampshire.  A summer coding in Seattle, Thanksgivings in Delaware, Spring Break in the Florida Keys.  I almost died hiking Tennessee’s fabled Smoky Mountains. I spent a year in DC mostly because someone gave me a job, before discovering San Francisco and falling in love. (With both the town and my girl)  I moved to Boston for a few years to start a company, drove cross country twice, and spent a couple months exploring the Southwest and ranching in Wyoming.  I drove to Alaska (and back!) camping the whole way.

This is all to say, this is my home.  I know this country well. And thus I wasn’t expecting today’s experience to be an emotional one, but it was.

I am nominally Canadian and Egyptian.  Canadian via my parents after they immigrated there many years ago, though I’ve never lived there.  Egyptian by blood.  My name and face are Egyptian. If you force me to distill where I’m from down to one place, and I respect you enough to open up my complex story, I will likely settle on Egypt.  But similarly never having lived there, barely speaking the language, there is a disconnect.  It is an approximation at best.  As a patrol officer in the midst of an unfortunate predicament on the Quebec border once told me, “Son, you are a man without a country.”  Thus is the story of the American immigrant, and the connection I felt to those 1000 others from 108 countries sitting around me at the Oath Ceremony this morning.  Every one of us has lived a liminal experience to varying degrees for years. Separated from family, afraid to do something wrong and reset the whole process, your dreams in the hands of an immigration officer who you hope isn’t having a bad day.  Today there was a definite feeling of excitement pervading the room, but one tinged with relief.

But then you step back and realize that this is the same process that has been going on for generations.  America is a country of immigrants.  This is how the sausage of America is made, one Oath of Allegiance at a time.  And that is what really got to me.  Being part of this process, this process that is so imperfect, yet at the same time the most perfect process the human race has yet imagined, to create a better society.  Incredibly humbling.

On Healthcare

Government exists to provide for citizens what they cannot provide for themselves adequately and at scale. We agree on roads and schools, but for some mystifying reason in the United States, healthcare is not intrinsically considered to be part of that essential group. Mystifying because no one argues about the need for a military to protect us. To protect our freedom to live healthy lives in pursuit of our dreams. I would argue that providing universal healthcare is the most fundamental responsibility of government, trumping commerce, defense and education. There is nothing more basic and core to the pursuit of happiness.

However, I also sadly believe that requiring a citizen to purchase insurance, dictating how they spend their money, is unconstitutional and I believe Justice Kennedy, the lone swing vote on a court that has sadly mimicked the polarism of the nation, will likely come to the same conclusion.

The ‘great compromise’ of the free market solution to healthcare is flawed at its very core. Government’s role is to protect a free market, not use it for its own means. Universal healthcare needs to be ‘free’, ie paid for by taxpayer dollars in the same way that schools and roads are. Every other developed nation has made it work, and the United States with the strongest social contract of any nation, (‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’) must find a way as well.

What it takes to make minimum wage as an independent musician

There’s been a lot of talk in my circles these days about the pros/cons of different musician revenue models.  

Some good thoughts about it are laid out here: http://derekwebb.tumblr.com/post/13503899950/giving-it-away-how-free-music-makes-more-than-sense

And here’s a great infographic depicting the options.

via Information is Beautiful