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We Walkers, We Immigrants

Is there a name for hating what you are?

We are, as is every nation except for where we began in Africa, a nation of immigrants.  We are walkers, we humans, having walked almost everywhere, when there were land bridges, and when there weren't, following currents, or using the wind, to migrate almost everywhere except Antarctica.

Here in the Americas, the first people came from what is now Russia, and before that, from Asia and Europe, and still earlier, from Africa where all of us began.

The next explorers apparently came from Scandinavia, by way of Iceland and Greenland.  The Spanish came.  Then, like a flood, Europeans came.  African slaves were hauled here.  Asians came.  Irish came, and the Scandinavians came, again.  Italians and Puerto Ricans and Poles and Iraqis and Turks came.

They are still coming.  Human beings are still stirring.  Our long-term human relatives from Guatemala and Mexico and Nicaragua and walking north.

And a lot of us hate it.
We hate what all of us are.
All of us are immigrants.

It is quite likely that the only immigrants who were not scorned, when first they came, were the first people.  They had to wait for the next immigrants.  They waited for ten or fifteen thousand years, but the scorn came.

The scorn continues.
We scorn ourselves.
We are the immigrants.

I am an immigrant's grandson, and the son of another immigrant.  We were "Squareheads":  Norwegians.  I don't know what that meant to the people who said it.  I suspect it meant they thought we were stupid, because my Dad, born in Norway, learned English as an adult, from earlier Norwegian immigrants.  I worked with other such immigrants, on fishing boats in Alaska, who taught newer immigrants how to talk like Americans.  They talked about Thomas Jefferson, in broad accents.

Now I tell jokes about Norwegians in a broad immigrant accent I had to learn.  "Do you remember how Ole and Lena first met?  She vass a Sunday School teacher. . . ."

I ache for the Mexicans and Guatemalans, for the Somalis and Hmong and Koreans who come here to do the work we don't want to do, or to become something they hope to be.  They are scorned by those whose parents and grandparents came earlier for the same reasons.  

It repeats itself.

My father was an immigrant.
My mothers's parents were immigrants.
I have a Thai stepson, and a Black adopted daughter from Guyana.
Some of my best friends are like me; you know,
stupid about who, and how special, we are.

American exceptionalism?
We are human beings.
We came here from everywhere.

It would be exceptional if we recognized how ordinary that is.

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