Welcome home

The protestors in the streets around the country are angry about a lot of things, with good reason. But first and foremost, they are homesick. 

If you know me at all, you've probably heard me say that homesickness is the universal human condition. Our lives begin with a violent separation from a place that is warm, dim but lit by a soft pink glow, quiet but filled with a soft and constant rhythm, where most of us get to float without hunger or thirst or anxiety for nine months. The world we're born into is loud and bright and cold. People are poking us and expecting things from the moment we emerge, and we have to ask to be fed. The outside world has its compensations, but we never quite forget that sense of home, of a place where we are always welcome and always cared for.

The worst thing one human being can say to another is "You don't belong here." But it's the first thing any group of people does, once we form. We do it for reasons that feel valid and justified. It conserves scarce resources, it reinforces bonds among the group, it makes it easier to protect ourselves. You might even say it's an evolutionary imperative. It's why we're walking the planet: because our ancestors belonged, or figured out a way to belong by forming new groups or insinuating themselves into existing ones. We're alive because we have either inherited that belonging, or learned how to join groups that protect us, or created those groups for ourselves. 

Police within a society are responsible for protecting that society from people who cause harm. It can be a dangerous job, and the people who do it share a bond that creates its own group, with its own sense of who belongs and who doesn't. That's a necessary and understandable coping mechanism, but it becomes destructive when the police decide they get to say who belongs and who doesn't.

In the United States of America in 2020, a lot of us were prospering before the virus hit. How many of us were focused on protecting our groups, instead of on making sure that other people felt they too had a place to belong? 

Videos are circulating of Atlanta Chief of Police Erika Shields and Dallas Chief of Police Renée Hall walking through crowds of protestors last night—talking to them, treating them like citizens, like people who were where they were supposed to be in their own hometowns. That is the only way we'll get back to any kind of peaceful coexistence: by seeing each other, by talking to each other, by recognizing that these cities and this country and this planet are home to all of us, and each of us belongs just as much as everybody else. 

This morning the man in the White House said tonight would be "MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE." He has spent the last four years telling a lot of this country that they don't belong and they aren't welcome. What does his country look like, then? Is he the President only of those people? Where are the rest of us supposed to go, if we're not welcome in his country? 

Those questions have no acceptable answers. We have to find a way to welcome each other home again.