Being American - None of US are Islands Alone

I saw a movie last night that struck several cords from joy to frustration to anger. All about people. Not one kind of people, them over there, they, but all people. And in that sense about Americans. Being American. What that means. What ever that means?

It's odd to have an island named after you that represented a door, a passage way, a gate to all those people, regardless of origin, color, perspectives, experiences. A word that dangled in the desire of faraway sleepless nights and unfulfilled dreams. Ellis Island. To so many it launched a freedom granted to you at birth, for no price, and you have never in all your global wanderings stepped foot there. Yes there, on that small, originally 5 acres, of terra firma that somehow meant more than all others; between 1892 to 1954 millions of people, a planet's worth, created the most remarkable crucible of human diversity our world has ever known: mixed with the poets and the thinkers, the scientists and the musicians, and farmers and shopkeepers, there were also bigots and hate mongers and those who would have you believe that theirs is the only American blood that flowed out of that remarkable crucible - that's the price of diversity - there are mosquitoes in the diverse beauty of the rainforest, and some of them carry malaria.

The Visitor is about the potential of continuing to give life to that remarkable crucible. The Visitor is a movie every American, illegal, legal, or by the luckiest miracle on Earth - of which you had no say in - you were born here. You paid no price for your luck - you can only pay it forward. And do so like The Visitor "with impressive grace and understatement, resist potential triteness and phony uplift." Qualities you wish were the gifts of being born American.

I agreed with one reviewer who wrote, "The most remarkable part of The Visitor is the way it organically shows the way life can change un-expectantly, unfairly and without warning and does it with real, raw emotion. Just when you think you've figured out what the movie is about, you [are] slapped with a new reality. It is frightening, timely and angering. Even the ending, which is not the typical movie ending, is emotive in a subtle and realistic way. I was not overwhelmed or underwhelmed by the movie, I was perfectly whelmed; a task indeed."

Like living as an American.

The Visitor was released in 2007, that year roughly 1 million immigrants entered America, none of them look like you and me, all of them look like US. That same year 283,000 were detained - 85% of them did not have access to a lawyer - their crime was dreaming of the crucible. That year there were 10,350 immigrant children placed in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services.

The goal of all this? To protect US from terrorism, the them, the there. The price? The crucible crumbles and diversity dies.

*****

A footnote of comparison: On September 11th, 2001 the them destroyed 2,973 lights of imagination and hope and joy in the crucible of diversity. By comparison that same year the them (drunk drivers) destroyed 17,448 lights of imagination and hope and joy in the crucible of diversity. The latter terrorism has continued every year since, and still.