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Blogs by Jerri Blair
Freedom still lives 10/29/2018 6:52:36 PM
The history of immigration and its juncture with America. I've been thinking a lot lately about the human race in all its glory and its ugly underbelly. Terrible things happening around us bring those age-old questions about the nature of man to mind. Are we as a species basically good or basically evil? So much time has been spent and so many words written or spoken pondering this question, but its answer can be elusive.
I'm an eastern philosopher at heart so to me we're both. Good doesn't exist as a concept without evil as its opposite.Good and evil only exist inside the dimensions of the physical universe. We are all pure in the innermost part of our being, all a part of the one, no one individual any better or worse at that core. But there are very clearly differences when we look at how we conduct ourselves in the world.
I wonder sometimes how any American can forget that we are a nation of immigrants. I love the human kindness that Lady Liberty represents. She stands in her blue-green majesty holding a light for all to see as she welcomes the tired, the poor, the hungry to a nation that is a remarkable step forward in the evolution of the human spirit. That's what America has been. It's very hard to see that open spirit closing its arms and mind to those who suffer today.
The thing I find really ironic about any human who hates an immigrant for their status is the fact that outside those who reside on the African continent, we're all just a bunch of immigrants. Every human being in the world has an ancestry that tracks back to the African continent. The human race developed there and then dispersed to other parts of the world ... so, really, we're all just a bunch of immigrants from Africa trying to make it in the world.
If you have questions about what I'm saying, look up Lucy, the Australopithecus Afarensis female who is or at least was once considered the oldest potential ancestor of every hominin species. In 1974, when her over three million year old fossilized bones were discovered in Ethiopia, she was named for Lucy of the Beatles's "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and almost immediately everyone knew she'd be a star too. Then there's Mitochondrial Eve, another African lass, this one the presumed source of all female mitochondrial DNA in the world, the ancestor that is the oldest common female human ancestor of us all. Scientists might disagree on some of the finer points about how man developed, but all of the scientific world agrees that humans developed in Africa and then dispersed to the other continents.
And, of course, if you're not a member of a Native American tribe, your ancestor's immigration to this continent came a relatively short time ago, a few hundred years at the most.
So, there you have it. We're all immigrants in one way or another. We need to look out for our own ... which includes the entire population of the planet ... a world filled with our fellow immigrants and the brothers and sisters with whom we share our ultimate original home place in Africa.
I know this may sound a little silly, but the basic thought is important. We need to stop thinking of the other as inferior or dangerous. We need to give peace a chance.I don't mean we have to take in every person who comes knocking at the door, but we need to act with civility and recognize there's a need to cooperate with all in trying to ease the pain of those in the world that are suffering. That's what we've been doing as the land of the brave and the home of the free for many years. We cannot allow Lady Liberty's light to be dimmed by irrational fear or even rational fear. Our forefathers all strongly believed that choosing safety over freedom would be a death knell to democracy. We must hold tight to the freedom they and so many since have fought to preserve.
