Our neighbors

When I started this blog I really had no intention of it being so much a political statement.  But my guy told me a blog sometimes takes on a life of its own.  Well, I have found that to be true.

We all belong to something. A family, an organization, a political party, a community, something.  What a lot of people do not seem to realize these days is that we belong to a world community.  We always have.  We are a country of immigrants.  Not one of us here in the United States, except native Americans and Latinos, can say that our ancestors have been here for more than 250 years.

Part of why I started this blog is because I have a hard time feeling as though I belong.  I wanted to express who I am, so that those who think they know me and read this could know me better and I feel I have some things to say.

The events of the last few days, the immigration ban, has caused me to do some serious soul-searching about why it made me so doggone angry.  I took it very personally that we were stopping people from coming into this country who were fleeing oppression or just trying to get back to their families.  I felt like they were trying to stop my next door neighbor and in a way that is true.

We cannot think of ourselves any more as anything other than a member of a world community. If people around the globe are having issues they are our issues.  They do affect us.  From our economy to our hearts when we see what the atrocities taking place are doing to our fellow human beings.  We can no longer look at a screen and say "Oh too bad about the war here or there."  That war effects each and every one of us.  We have troops around the globe who have families waiting for them here in the United States.  If you don't think they think of the world as a community, think again.  They are defending those neighbors.  They are losing their lives for those neighbors.

Maybe that is what needs to happen.  We need to start thinking of immigrants as our neighbors. Would you turn away your neighbor if their house was on fire?  Well many of the people who are being turned away do not even have a house to be on fire.  It was bombed, by their own leader, especially Syrians.

So I challenge you to think more about who your neighbors really are.  Broaden the scope of your community, because in this day and age, the people of the world are our neighbors.