As a White person with an ancestry in the United States that goes back before the country existed, I’ve spent most of my life assuming the truth of American Exceptionalism.
Don’t get me wrong – I’ve been critical of my country most of my life – but there was still this belief in some of our principles and maybe even the Constitution that let me think “we’re different” and “we’ll get around to fixing that.”
One of the things that kept that belief intact was birthright citizenship.
I recall learning at some point that people who were born in Germany to parents who had come from other places to work there were not German citizens and I was appalled. I had always assumed that birthright citizenship was a given everywhere, but instead it appeared it was an exception.
As in exceptional. As in one of the things that makes the United States exceptional.
The grifter – who is back in the White House because no one with the authority chose to enforce another provision of the 14th Amendment that bars insurrectionists from office – wants to take away one of the key elements of American Exceptionalism.
He doesn’t want the country to be exceptional. He just wants to do his performative powerful rich man routine and see how many people he can hurt in the process.
Of the many things that man and his minions – or maybe his handlers, given the financial power of the broligarchs – are doing to destroy our country, this might not be the worst. Even the current Supreme Court might rule it violates the Constitution. It’s certainly not the one that will affect me personally, given my ancestry.
(The only people who have the right to tell me I don’t belong here are those whose ancestors were here before the Europeans invaded, and that certainly doesn’t include people like the grifter.)
But it’s the one that stabs me in the heart. There’s just something about the principle that if you’re born someplace, you belong there.
I mean, where else can you really belong but the place you were born?
More than just an American, I will always be a Texan, even though I’m very glad I’m not living there these days. And I will not let the right wing misogynists running that state tell me I’m not.
I’ve always liked some lines from Robert Frost’s “The Hired Man:”
‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.’‘I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’
That’s the way I feel about the place where I was born. That’s the way I think everyone is entitled to feel about the place they were born.
Being born somewhere means you have a right to be there. It’s not something you have to deserve.
And they do have to take you in.
I just re-read the poem and it made me cry. It always makes me cry.
I’ve never been a fan of the national borders and citizenship and residency rights human beings have invented over centuries to make sure a large number of people on this planet are always in a no win situation.
I just know that in my gut I feel like having a home – in all its senses – should be a given.
I hope the suits being brought against this nonsense succeed. I will support them. I wish I still trusted that the system would overturn this nonsense.
Because it matters. The right to live where you were born matters.