6,000 Mile Project Asks: What Does It Mean To Be An American?

WAUKESHA, WI — What does it mean to be an American citizen?

That's the quest of James Piltch, a 23-year-old Harvard graduate from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

"American citizenship appears to be in a difficult place. People aren’t voting. They don’t trust the federal government. And maybe most importantly, they don’t feel like they matter," he said.

Piltch stopped in Waukesha, Wisconsin, from Sept 22 to 23 as part of "The Citizen's Story," a grueling 6,000-mile trip across the United States over 85 days to speak with residents across the country about what they feel it means to be an American.

Piltch has interviewed people in big cities and small towns, he's been through the Bible Belt, the Rust Belt, the Prairie states and the Midwest. As he guides his beat-up Honda CRV along freeways and poorly-marked back roads, there's a few things he's learned about people.

On his journey, he's searching for common threads, and one just kept on coming up no matter where he went. "Political engagement is very important to people, especially volunteering with politicians and staying informed," he said.

Yet when it came to staying informed, Piltch found that the media fostered distrust among the people he interviewed. "They feel like the media distorts their image to the other side. They see a Democrat on Fox News or a Republican on CNN and they don't know what's true. That frustrates them," he said.

Pilch said the political stereotypes are so strong that he challenged his friends to guess the political views of one particular interviewee in Mishawaka, Indiana.

"They said this person was definitely a Democrat — but in reality he voted for Trump," he said. "Many people made an assumption about what mattered, and they were wrong. There are still certain things we share, even though we're sometimes not willing to admit it."

Journey Comes to Waukesha

So what exactly attracted Piltch to Waukesha? "I just didn't want to go to Milwaukee," he said. "I looked up some more conservative-leaning cities, and Waukesha looked beautiful."

Piltch interviewed Terri Stine, a local candle artisan and owner of Fruits of the Spirit Candle shop on the 300 block of West Broadway Street in Downtown Waukesha, on Sep. 28.

In an interview titled "God's Plan," Stine said the country's biggest division is that citizens don't compromise. "The biggest problem is that people aren’t willing to even try to work together. That means compromise," Stine told Piltch. "That means not getting everything you want. And that’s OK! The attitude of 'I’m going to make this decision to feel a certain way' doesn’t accomplish anything. The whole meld together and come together thing doesn’t work if you stand apart from someone because they’re different."

Pulling it Together

Piltch is collecting his interviews and posting them online at The Citizen's Story, What it Means to Be an American. Here, interviews are posted alongside an overview of the project, as well as his view on what it means to be a good citizen.

Piltch said he got the idea during the runup to the 2016 presidential election. "It was the point when politics became more important than shared American-ness. That was kind of alarming to me," he said. He got the suggestion to talk about what it means to be an American, "so I ran with it."

As late summer turns to fall, and American political debate swirls over immigration, nuclear war, the flag and patriotism, James Piltch is still running.

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submitted photo, published with permission