Homesick

Let’s go back to a time, if you had one, where you felt safe, where things were simpler, where cookies and milk were a solution to a lot of what ailed you, where you likely didn’t have to focus much on anything besides your small world.

For time this was maybe 5 or 6 years old. 1968/1969 for me was a new house and new instant friends next door and down the street. Dinner on the table, concerned teachers, church every Sunday followed by a drive to your Grandparents, 

playing in the garden and sandbox, then Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, followed by The Wonderful World of Disney and then falling asleep in the car on the way home.

Those of us lucky enough to have this sort of childhood hopefully relate to what I describe even if yours was earlier or later. It was a gift. Our parents made this happen for us. There are many who didn’t have this (a discussion for another time, however). A world we can sometimes be homesick for.

But the real world wasn’t safe in 1968/1969. Womens and Civil Rights struggles. Vietnam, the Tet Offensive. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinated. Qaudafi takes Libya. Chinese and the Russians clashing. Nixon announces candidacy. Stonewall Riots.

I was too young to understand these things or pay attention to most of them.

And it’s that uncomplicated world that Trump is appealing to when he speaks to his core followers – MAGA. Nobody that age was trying to understand which pronouns best described them. Nobody was questioning God. Nobody was making them think about Global Warming, Aids, Apartheid, School Shootings, World Hunger, recycling, etc… in any meaningful way. Nobody was pushing their limits, making them think. 

They were not understanding the horrors of the age, only some of the brilliance.

You cannot go home – it doesn’t exist except in your mind. And the reason is, you are an adult – you understand more of the world around you – you are conscious and aware and you know that people have all kinds of things to survive in this world. You realize that the person sitting next to you at a bus stop may have been exposed to discrimination all of their life.

You try to understand an imperfectly adapt to the changing world around you. It’s difficult. It’s perilous. And it’s worth it. 

Because only when we recognize that our struggles are our own, but we’re in this all together – where we recognize and help lift each other, in whatever ways we can, that we succeed.

Repression of everything that has changed, that we don’t understand, that doesn’t agree with our world view, that makes us have to be have differently is not the answer. The world moves and changes and we must with it. It’s the only way to real happiness and peace, that doesn’t exclude others.

And there is the rub. You have to care about others that aren’t like you. And that’s why the white nationalism, the racism, the anti LGBTQ+ actions, the propaganda calling civil rights protesting anti-American, the propaganda calling immigrants and Muslims the enemy. It’s framed around presenting a world sterilized of everything that is different and challenging that world view.

And it’s being sold not because Mr. Trump believes it. It’s being sold because the base believes it and will vote for it. It’s being sold because the money that has taken over power will unscrupulously pander to people who prefer not to step out of their protective shell and change.

Our challenge is to help those around us step out. To embrace some discomfort for the good of humanity. To find joy in others success and joy.

It’s hard to get people to walk in others shoes, to forget the homesick feeling they have in their gut and understand that it’s nostalgia for something that doesn’t exist anymore – to leave that behind and see how the world needs to change for everyone to live together, each on their own way.

It’s hard. I’m as guilty as the next person being homesick at times. Wanting to go back to that simpler life. I get there through a song or picture or something else that triggers a memory. And it’s ok to live there for a minute, to revel in the back of the car sleep. But a few minutes later, when I wake up, I put on my big boy pants and catch up with the rest of the world and understand it’s not just about me.

But it is also about me - here, in the world many of us are striving to make, I get to choose what I listen to, how I live my life, who and how I love – as long as it doesn’t step on others rights to do the same.

One way of helping others there is by pulling them to the scene of abuse, helping them walk side by side with the abused then helping them step into those shoes. A good example of this is during the closing argument of “A time to kill”.

The trial of a black man who kills the man who raped his little girl. All white jury, in the south. Jake, the protagonist lawyer, walks the jury agonizingly through the rape and beating of the little black girl. The urination on her, the throwing of her fragile, broken body over the bridge and being left for dead. “Can you see her?”

“Now, imagine she’s white”.

Suddenly the white jurist is transported to standing in the shoes of someone who is horrified and is now seeing the horror from their own shoes – from their own house, if you will. If you cannot get them to care about others, then get them to care about themselves in the same circumstance. That their safe home is not safe for others.

This is how we get some of those that cannot go any other way there. There are those that cannot be shaken even then. But we know the majority of folks want to coexist. Want to revel in the joy of others as well as their own. Who want everyone to be able to live, love and worship with dignity and respect. There is comfort in that, as we face the vocal few who still cannot get there, who are being tweeted to.

Home. That home is a place of mutual respect, not a world sanitized of all that is different. Keep that in mind as you fight the good fight. Keep that in mind as you persevere.

Where we came from, where we are going

As you are enjoying your coffee or latte, eating your breakfast burrito or sandwich, dreading your 40 minute commute to your workplace on Monday, imagine you were desperate enough to change your life that you leave the place you were born on foot.

Imagine walking for months, not knowing how you were going to eat, but knowing ahead there’s a place where you can eat regularly, maybe even have  bed, where the threat to life is only occasional and accidental. Where exploitation is as minimal as it can be.

Then imagine the toil of getting there and having to deal with arbitrary constructs called borders and imaginary obstructions to finding reasonable way of making a life let alone a living, that were lumped in with legitimate law, as you pass through one country to another, until you finally reach your destination and find they put up the biggest artificial constraints of all.

We enjoy our privilege because our grandparents or theirs made this journey themselves – many on boats, but many on foot too. All of them taking their lives in their hands. And unless you are Native American, this is your family story. And we enjoy what we enjoy because they were given the opportunity to join this country.

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In New York for one evening on a training, I rush to Battery Park to catch the last boat to Ellis Island to view my Grandparents names on the wall there (my Aunt went through trouble of getting their passage recognized, as thousands have). All four of my Grandparents came from Europe, over on boats. orphaned by the Russian Revolution, others with their parents, looking for a better life.
As I looked at Yasha and Helen’s names on the wall, I was overwhelmed with gratitude, with the memories of these dear people, who worked so hard, changing their lives and subsequently making mine possible.

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The people making their way here are doing so because they are at best in poverty and need and at worst, in danger. We are the 3rd largest country in the world. We have a population density of 36 people per square kilometer – maybe a little higher (number is 2016). In India it’s 416 per square kilometer. Our fear of scarcity in this, the most lush and vibrant economy in the world, is unfounded. Our prejudices about people of different origin and in some cases different skin color based in scripting from generations of prejudice and propaganda, especially in the propaganda of these political years, where one party has decided that calling these people the enemy will allow them to stay in power.

In a self made crisis, in one of engineered mismanagement and underfunding, they are pointing as these people, who are fundamentally us, as a threat. Clearly, as we look at the past, anytime someone has pointed at an unorganized group of humans as a threat, it’s been a move to further themselves (think of McCarthyism. Think of the interment of Japanese Americans. Think of the Nazi persecution of Jews. And on and on.) We not only have the ability to welcome more, but a moral one. Being born somewhere is hardly good criteria from which to separate humans.

Yes, we need to screen and understand who is coming here and try to ensure they are not bringing hate with them (just as we see, we need to do a better job of this within our borders, for people who were born here). But this crisis is a political stunt, done with malice and hurting thousands, ripping families apart as a grab for control over a fearful part of our populace, by an oligarchy, with the goal of staying in power, to further exploit the populace, through government and business.

We cannot allow this to continue to be our way. We are the land of equality and the land of opportunity – not in perfect practice, but in declaration, in purpose and we need to strive to pull ourselves back on to that path.
We do that by;

• Voting in people who believe in and act on diversity, human rights and secular law
• Influencing government, business and neighbors to understand and work for these goals once again
• Build laws that help prevent this from ever happening again, that value human dignity and account for basic human rights and needs for all of us. 

And if you think this is not what this country is about, then read through our founding documents again. Read the words of our great women and men – and understand. We are not here to stake a claim against the rest of humanity, but side by side with them. There is no us and them. It is just us.