Lawrence, Kansas Is Showing the World What America Really Looks Like

Rock Chalk Algeria!

I was not expecting to cry about Kansas this week.

I have been crying a lot lately, though crying is the wrong word. It's more like being moved. Overwhelmed by videos of the human spirit doing what it does when no one is performing for anyone. Is JoyCore a thing? It should be. What is the opposite of doomscrolling? Whatever it is, I've been doing it compulsively for two weeks.

Arsenal won the league for the first time in twenty-two years, and the most multicultural fan base in football spilled into the streets of North London in spontaneous, improvised celebration. Every language, every background, every corner of the world, somehow finds its way to the same club. And of course, my Knicks, this impossibly lovable Knicks team, uniting New York City in a way that New York does not usually allow itself to be united. My dopamine generators have been running impossibly hot and, for once, I haven’t wanted them to stop. I should probably give up sports after this run.

And then Algeria’s men’s national team arrived in Lawrence, Kansas.

I found myself reading the comments pile up on a Men in Blazers Instagram post, and I was gone again.

The most-liked comment, with 7,156 likes, read simply: “Genuinely the average American.” Others piled in. People who had lived in Lawrence said these were their neighbors, exactly who they knew them to be. Algerians said they were moved. Someone wrote that they hoped Lawrence and Algeria would become sister cities. The whole thread felt like something that doesn’t happen on the internet anymore: strangers being kind to each other across enormous distances, in real time, about something real. I can’t remember where I saw it, but someone wrote “Lawrence, Kansas, is single-handedly repairing America’s global standing,” and to be honest? I’m fucking here for it.

The story is not that Lawrence welcomed Algeria, because having lived in Kansas, this reception is precisely who these people are. The story is that millions of people saw Lawrence welcoming Algeria and interpreted it as evidence about America. (If you want to see for yourself, just search for Kansas and Algeria in your favorite social media platform and prepare to feel the feelings.)

Here is the backdrop, because it matters. We are in the middle of a border crackdown, military conflict in the Middle East, and a period when the United States has been methodically burning its relationships with allies. The phrase “America First” has functioned in practice as “America Alone.” The world has been watching and drawing conclusions — some fair, some not, all of them hardening into a portrait of a country that has turned inward, suspicious of strangers, hostile to the outside world. That is the America the world was watching when Algeria arrived in Lawrence, Kansas to set up their World Cup base camp.

I grew up in Kansas. I went to KU. For 35 years in New York, I have had some version of the same conversation: I meet someone who went to Lawrence, and within five minutes, we are both lit up talking about it. The campus. The limestone buildings on the hill. The way everyone there seems genuinely happy to be there — not performed happiness, not college-brochure happiness, but the real thing. Lawrence has always had that quality. An oasis, we call it, though that word undersells it. It’s not just that Lawrence is tolerant or open-minded the way a college town can be in a self-congratulatory way. It’s that the people are curious. Eager. They want to connect with you. That’s the culture, and it runs deep.

So when Algeria arrived and Lawrence turned out to meet them, I was not surprised. I was moved, but I was not surprised.

The videos started appearing. A few thousand people packed an open practice at Rock Chalk Park. The KU band learned and performed the Algerian national anthem. Riyad Mahrez thanked the city publicly. Locals showed up at the team hotel waving Algerian flags, chanting, taking photos, treating the team less like temporary visitors than long-lost relatives.

To many Algerians, Lawrence wasn’t just welcoming a soccer team. It was offering an image of America that looked radically different from the one they had been seeing on their phones and televisions.

The story escaped Kansas. It escaped the United States. It escaped sports.

What began as a welcome from a few thousand Kansans spread far beyond local news. Algerian television covered it. Major sports outlets picked it up. Men in Blazers — one of the most widely followed soccer accounts in the English-speaking world — called it “the World Cup we love.” Social media accounts with audiences in the millions amplified it. For several days, videos from Lawrence were circulating across Algeria, France, and the broader Arab world, introducing millions of people to a college town in Kansas they had never heard of a week earlier. An Arabic-language post showing the scenes — fans at the hotel, the KU band, the flags — circulated with a caption that translated roughly to: This is not the America we know. It got 13,000 likes. The replies didn’t argue with it. They celebrated it.

For several days, one of the most widely shared images of America in parts of the world that rarely see themselves reflected warmly in American life was not New York or Los Angeles or Washington.

It was Lawrence.

What Lawrence is doing can’t be packaged or replicated because it isn’t strategic. It’s dispositional. These people are this way. They have always been this way. I know because I grew up near them, went to school with them, and have been running into them in New York for three and a half decades. The warmth is not a performance. The curiosity is not manufactured. When Lawrence says welcome home, they mean it.

The world recognized that. That’s what the virality was actually about — not the novelty of Kansas welcoming Algeria, but the recognition of something increasingly rare: people acting from genuine feeling, without agenda, without irony, without the slight self-consciousness that infects almost everything now. In an era when the World Cup itself has become a four-year commercial and political exercise, when every gesture of international goodwill arrives pre-packaged and focus-grouped, Lawrence showed up with nothing but itself.

For several days, a college town in Kansas became an argument about America.

Not the America of campaign slogans or cable-news monologues. Not the America of border fights, military briefings, and diplomatic feuds. Just a few thousand people who saw strangers arrive from halfway around the world and decided to make them feel welcome.

The remarkable thing is that Lawrence never set out to make that argument. The world made it for them.

Rock Chalk Algeria!