What is the name of the President of the United States?

Ok, so I'll come right out and say it. I passed the citizenship test. Woohoo! Now I need to wait for the results to make it to the desks of the powers that be, and for them to in turn assign the date for my oath ceremony. Then, once I'm finally a citizen, the first thing I will do will be to figure out what country I can vacation in next WITHOUT having to mortgage my soul to get a visa. Oh, sweetness. I can almost taste it. So close!

The day of my interview started well, since Saeeda thankfully decided not to go into labor. Confident that I would not be missing the birth of my first child, and would therefore not be in the proverbial doghouse for the rest of my existence, I took the second half of the day off from work to show up at Chicago's USCIS offices. Here, I was directed to a large hall on the 3rd floor of a massively ugly building, where there were at least a hundred other individuals waiting for the same thing that I was - the test itself.

Officers would magically appear from some hidden door, call out names, and gather the applicants to take them back through their magical door. My name was called 20 min. after I got seated, and I was led back into a nondescript office. My officer asked me to take an oath that I'd be telling the truth, asked me to take a seat, and then got started on the quiz.

Keep in mind that I had studied all week long from the USCIS study guide, and was ready for anything. Anything. I was not prepared, however, for the mind-boggling simplicity of the questions.

"What is the name of the place where the President lives?"
"What was the name of the boat that the Pilgrims came over in?"
"What is the capital of your state?"
"What is the constitution?"
"What is the name of the President of the United States?"

And so it went. At one point I started wondering who had thought up this process. You make an immigration applicant spend years in the system (ten years in my case), only to cap the journey with this? That's what it took to become a citizen? Ten years of excruciating, snail-paced, mind-numbingly complex form-filling (you think tax returns are bad? hah!), all to get to a 5 minute questionnaire that was ridiculously straightforward?

But all of that didn't matter, not to me, and not to the hopeful individuals waiting back in the hall outside. Individuals who in some cases had probably sweat blood and tears to get here. Individuals for whom English was a challenge, for whom memorizing Constitutional amendments was akin to learning Martian, for whom it was not important what the capital of their state was or what the names of the 13 original colonies were. For them, all that mattered was being allowed to become a recognized part of their adopted country, to enjoy the rights that many ignored willfully, and to be able to defiantly look the next xenophobe squarely in the eye and with nothing to fear.

To us, all it mattered was that we be allowed to become citizens.