Month: January 2018

… And Compassion For None (unless they are just like us).

The inanities and misinformation that inundate us from Washington D.C. about the immigration of foreigners into freedom’s land and bravery’s home is making all of us sick.

Unless we are the offspring of the indigenous peoples who inhabited this continent before the Europeans showed up, we’re all descendants of foreigners. So let’s take a moment to reflect on words from an anonymous writer in a community newspaper in Barcelona, as quoted by the Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, in Hunter of Stories, the last of his incomparable books:

Foreigner:

Your god is Jewish, your music is African, your car is Japanese, your pizza is Italian, your gas is Algerian, your coffee is Brazilian, your democracy is Greek, your numbers are Arabic, your letters are Latin.

I am your neighbor. And you call me a foreigner?

In worlds older, wiser and saner than the ones we live in, our ancestors marked their days according to the angle of the light of the sun. Light that for a time blazed with great intensity and warmth, making wheat and barley, apples and corn grow, gradually seemed to wither. After the harvest, shadows lengthened, flocks of birds flew away to the south, nights grew longer and colder. The sun appeared less and less above the horizon and on one day it seemed to shrivel and its light almost disappeared.
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