The American Identity

Despite, or perhaps because of, this country’s short history, the American identity is one of the most highly contested and undefinable of intangible ideas. Many of the highly debated abstract concepts are so often and sometimes needlessly argued over because they are indefinable. So much can fall under the categories of these types, like art, love, and poetry, that deems them impossible to narrow down into workable definitions. A blank canvas can be considered art and free verse is somehow still poetry, but the vagueness of the definitions of these words is not what plagues the attempts to specify the American identity. It is instead the juxtaposition of blatant contradictions that makes this particular abstract so difficult to pin down accurately.
America consists almost solely of polarization at this point, and the contradictory counterpart oriented nature was not simply invented by the last few generations. The nation’s conception is due to a great attitude of defiance and great acts of rebellion. It follows easily that a launching point might set enough precedence that the definition could orient itself around this same perspective; i.e., that the American identity could become defined by the exact disobedience that constructed the existence of such an identity in the first place. The most inclusive parameter of said identity to be present while still defining it more than the fans of semantics will with other abstract concepts is the progress based evolution of ideals