I
took a trip over Mother’s Day weekend, crossing 8 county lines before I reached
my destination. No one stopped me, asked
my name or required identification, nor should they have. I am an American citizen, and my right to
travel is guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
Had I crossed 8 state lines, the result would have been the same.
It was a great trip, wonderful to
see family and different scenery, but it was just as great to get back. I hate to leave home. As an American citizen, I am lucky because I
also have the right not to travel. I
have property rights and citizenship that allows me to stay put, to vote for my
representatives in government and to participate in some of its affairs, i.e.,
to claim this place for myself as home.
Those two rights - to stay and to go
- are not accorded to vast numbers of people around the globe. But there are people in this country who do
not have those rights either: the
homeless and the undocumented.
The exercise of both rights, to stay
and to go, costs money. The homeless,
though they may be U.S. citizens, by and large do not have enough money to stay
under a roof. The lack of a permanent
address prevents their exercise of many other rights, including voting. The undocumented, however, most of whom
immigrated here to find work, may have
the money to keep sheltered and otherwise legal, but the threat of deportation
(especially now) puts extreme limits on their ability to stay as well as to go.
T
These thoughts brought to mind some
lyrics from a Ry Cooder song from the Dust Bowl, a time when huge numbers of
American citizens were displaced, stripped from their homes, and forced to
travel to find work or else starve. Despite being citizens, many were prevented
from crossing state lines, or were so harassed by locals in the communities
where they camped there was no option but to move on. The lyrics go: “How can you keep on moving unless you
migrate too? They tell you to keep on
moving, but migrate you must not do. The
reason that I’m moving, the reason that I roam, is to get to a new location and
find myself a home.”
Then my mind flashed to another set
of words from a book by John Berger, And
Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984). In it he provides a broader perspective on
migration:
“The transformation from a nomadic
life to a settled one is said to mark the beginning of what was later called
civilization. Soon all those who
survived outside the city began to be considered uncivilized... Perhaps during
the last century and a half an equally important transformation has taken
place. Never before our time have so
many people been uprooted. Emigration,
forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is
the quintessential experience of our time.”
London born, living in a French
village, Berger’s European timeline is longer than our American one, but both
Old and New Worlds have experienced and are made of these two
transformations: movers and stickers,
settled and migrant. Perhaps if we
looked at the reasons for both, we lucky settled ones would find better ways to
accommodate the travelers, especially those looking for a new home.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a semi-nomadic writer who is grateful for the roof over her
head. You can send her your travel
thoughts and stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a message below.
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