Stay

 Love it or leave it. 

Those were the choices we were given, once upon a time, via a bumper sticker to those of us who were having difficulty aligning ourselves with the vision of America's involvement in Vietnam. In my mind's eye I can imagine that once upon an even longer time ago there were stickers affixed to the back of coaches and horse drawn carts in England encouraging those who resisted the King's taxation to "Submit to His Majesty or Flee These Shores."

Since there was this nice big empty land mass just across the pond, that's what many folks chose to do. In the intervening two and a half centuries the available inhabitable real estate across the globe has been filled up with groups of people searching for their own place in the sun. I will cite as an example of such a challenge the case of a group of German expatriates who fled their homeland after World War I in search of a place they could found their own New World. The story of how wrong this experiment went can be found in the little-seen Opie Cunningham film called Eden.  This may have been Opie's way of making up for his involvement in another of his little-seen films, Hillbilly Elegy. 

I digress.

Finding a place where you can pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness outside of the place where it has been an advertised going concern has not gotten any easier since the war in Vietnam. I find it quietly amazing that the flow of immigration into the Somewhat United States remains so very high. We have the largest foreign born population of any country, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of our total.

See? I just said "we." And "us." Because you can't spell US without it. In spite of all the vitriol and xenophobic tirades being thrown around by people who have their own show on Fox News, people seem invested in finding their way to this country. 

Our country. Land of the free. Home of the brave. Inventor and chief purveyor of Taco Tuesday. The land of hope and dreams. 

Sometimes they really do come true.