United Nation

So far I've seen three spots in my neighborhood where, in bright pink spray paint, someone has written the words: "We all immigrants in America." The fourth grade teacher in me bristles initially at the lack of vowel in the sentence, but it's hard to argue the point. I suppose if one was predisposed to arguing, there could be some lengthy debate about those who crossed the Bering Strait when there was still a land bridge and those who were spontaneously generated on the continent of North America. If you're Tom Cruise, you would argue that we're all just colonists from another planet anyway, so stop whining about who was here first and pass the placenta, please.
No, instead I prefer to recall the words of the sage Bill Murray in "Stripes": "We're all very different people. We're not Watusi, we're not Spartans, we're Americans. With a capital "A", huh? And you know what that means? Do you? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We're the underdog. We're mutts." As he points out, further, is there any dog more lovable than a mutt? This is where we live, in a land of promises and dreams - some of them broken, some of them made.
In the past couple weeks, I've been teaching my kids about the Holocaust and the Middle Passage. They wanted to know how people could treat each other so badly. I have kids who can trace their heritage from Salvador, Jamaica, Guatemala, Tonga, Thailand, Mexico, Africa, and one who is "pretty sure" she's "at least one sixteenth Native American." I told them that America has a history of treating the newest members of its club poorly. I tell them that I don't know why that is. I told them that George Washington, the father of our country, was a slave owner, but in his will, he arranged for all of the slaves he owned to be freed after the death of his wife, Martha. We are a nation that learns from its mistakes. We learn slowly and painfully, but we learn. We all immigrants, after all.