Well, now here's a blog post I never thought I'd be making.
Special note: there are a couple of words in here that are not nice. I'm using them either for historical context or to better convey my emotions.
Growing up in a U.S. Foreign Service family -- and a Jewish one at that -- I learned early on that I had to be careful admitting my nationality (rarely mistaken, but I often hung out with friends of multiple other nationalities), and especially careful admitting my religion (depending upon where in the world I was and who I was talking to). Due to her age, L'il Sis didn't experience that as much when we were in South America, but she got a full dose of the "Oh, you're that" when we lived in Europe... usually from our "fellow" Americans, but no one had a monopoly on sucky behaviors.
That, along with other aspects of living outside one's "home" culture and country, gave us both a pretty good idea of what it feels like to be "the other," to not quite fit in, to have a "normal" that doesn't match the baseline of anyone else around us. That familiarity with otherness has helped us help Miriam navigate some of the things she's encountered (and that still pop show up unannounced and uninvited on the front porch of her psyche from time to time).
There was one thing we could depend on, though... Our otherness was a product of living in a "foreign" country. As homey as our abodes overseas felt, there was always a background hiss in the recording of "when we get back home," "things work better than this back home," "it's easier to be understood back home," and such.
Of course, in all the intervening years since last living "on the economy" outside the U.S., we've both had a steadily increasing number of experiences teaching us a new lesson: it ain't necessarily so. It's the battle cry of probably every generation that's ever been: Kids these days, they just don't understand. The "common" cultural references we took for granted seem to be less common by the day, behaviors and mores and ethics seem to be changing, and fer cryin' out loud what is it with everyone having some kind of digital device plastered to their face all the time instead of actually talking to each other face-to-face?
But there's also been an undertone, slowly growing in volume, that's been especially unnerving. Things we were specifically taught to not do or say, despite the casual bigotries & exclusions so common in the past. And now...
Now there's a vocal majority of Americans who have chosen to support a platform in which The Other is vilified, considered dangerous, meant to be a target; in which people who aren't obviously from a lineage that's been in the country a long time (read: Whites and American Blacks) are supposed to be "sent back home;" in which it's okay to be as nasty as you want; and in many cases, in which being a non-Christian means you're just wrong and need to be corrected (or sent back "home" where you came from).
(Quick aside: For many years, Dad -- very definitely a "my country right or wrong" kind of guy -- said that when taken as a whole, the American electorate was one of the stupidest on the planet. I know he would not be pleased to see how right he was.)
When I was a kid, there was this wonderful, safe, welcoming place that I knew I could go back to when the place I was living got too dangerous, a place where the rule of law guaranteed safety and order and freedom, a place where I might have to worry a little bit about being of the "wrong" religion but where I'd fit in 95% of the time no matter what. Yes, there were things my parents were shielding me from that I didn't know about until much later, but in general the words "United States of America" meant safety and shelter and acceptance.
Now I've got a small(ish), very obviously Asian, somewhat obviously Jewish, more than slightly Liberal niece who is home but suddenly has to be extra-careful what she says out loud or how she acts in public exactly the way I did when I was much younger and living in other countries... and who might even have to worry about someone deciding her otherness is so overwhelming that she needs to be sent back "home" where she came from because, after all, she's not my sister's "real" daughter.
(Yes, that's a much more extreme case and -- hopefully -- much less likely... but Mom is old enough to remember when "the Nips" were all herded into internment camps regardless of citizenship or loyalty due to their otherness. And Miriam is acutely aware of the fact that she's a member of this family because another family elected to essentially send her away.)
So now my discussions with my sister (and several close friends who know & care about Miriam's well-being) include questions about how to renew expired passports, who knows a good adoption lawyer so she can re-adopt her beloved daughter in her state of residence "just in case," how to help an already angsty treen remain true to herself without painting herself too brightly as an "other," and what's going to happen to her chances to choose her own future when we've already seen people holding up signs that read "Women are Property."
How did we get here? What the actual fuck happened?
