The Bridges We Burn
Perhaps we should go back to what once was
I'm feeling a bit stretched, if I’m honest, having just landed on Friday past from Ireland and now am, as the map in front of me succinctly highlights, somewhere over Lake Michigan on my way to see my mother. I’ve been up for 4 hours so far, and it’s just cresting 07:45 am, so I’m a bit cranky based on the relative lack of sleep. There’s a particular privilege to being able to fly cross-country, so I’ll take these moments and love them for what they are.
As I’ve travelled, I’m acutely aware of how people interact around me. It’s a character study found in airplane aisles, security lines, and boarding areas that hint at the human condition. I’m on what is lovingly called the “Silicon Express,” headed to San Francisco from Boston, surrounded by tens of technology executives, a few foreign tourists, and the delightful proletariat seeking to find their fortune on the opposite coast. I could make up stories about each of these groupings of humanity, but suffice it to say, it’s a veritable cornucopia of human experience.
I’m always curious about who or what causes people to move. As the title above so elegantly co-opts from “Back to the Future,” we can get from here to anywhere. Planes, trains, automobiles, rockets, and boats each provide a ready carriage to our desired destination, gated only by time and expense. It’s a modern marvel eclipsed only by the looming realisation that we, as humans, are crushing our world under the weight of our convenience. As we look to our great migrations, from coast to coast, country to country, across seas and oceans, we’re allowed to enjoin in new stories, cultures, and societies that bring more colour and contrast to us.
The harsh realities of this migration are brought to the fore when viewing the evening news and the vile racism spewed by such folks as Erika Lee, JD Vance, and Donald Trump as an attempt to dog whistle their moral turpitude and complicity in the growth of über-nationalism, a la the foment before the Beer-hall Putzsch of the early 1920s. The direct consequences of those actions were certainly felt throughout the duration of the 20th century though, if we’re critically self-evaluative, we’ve lost any sense of the “why” this matters. We’ve traded beer-halls for the digital social stage and history finds itself doomed to repeat.
People move for various reasons: safety, amnesty, hope, promise, family, friends, relationships, etc. The belief of and in a free society is presaged by the idea that the grass is truly greener where the sheep are free to roam, ungated, unfenced, unfettered. While perhaps the original intent is true, there is a furious amount of devilry in the details. I once had the process of immigration lovingly referred to as “racism with paperwork” by an Irish friend. While their comment was, perhaps, taking the piss out of the situation a bit, it’s not far removed from the realities that people from nations outside our tidy little demesne of rural and suburban white America experience.
We’ve done a lot to remove the logical bridges that connect people. We’ve put floats and jagged steel saw blades in the Rio Grande River, no doubt in an attempt to “secure our borders” against those terrorists seeking to wreak havoc on our sacred Texan borders. We’ve gutted DACA and increased the costs for processing; we’ve launched suppressive actions against minority political action committees to subvert elections and ensure that the white nationalism that we know and love is loudly proclaimed from one end of the nation to the other by way of Texas, of course. Oh, and we seek, at every opportunity, to separate families from each other, lying about the promises of other states while bussing and flying migrants from one end of the nation to the other. It’s political theatre with devastating real-world consequences all because an invading people 400 years ago decided that this land was theirs.*
You see, we’re too far removed from our original stories and histories. We’ve lost our place in the Book of Time and burned the bridges behind us in an attempt to forget our place and provenance. We proudly call ourselves “American” in one breath and, in the next, ape the Anglo-Saxon history we’ve always believed we were, attempting to co-opt for ourselves another story, another place, another time. We’ve got goldfish memories, knowing only our tiny glass bubbles of infinite insignificance, and we attempt to lever our capitalism, our brute strength, to ensure those who are different suffer.
We see this in Springfield, Ohio, where the insufferable Erika Lee decided that she was going to play a game of social media telephone and touched off bomb threats, a KKK flyer bonanza, and a Proud Boys march, all because she thought those who were “different” were doing something she didn’t like. We hear this every time JD Vance opens his insufferable (and fascinatingly hypocritical) mouth, decrying all the attention placed on him for “making up stories” to ensure the widening gyre of racism and social malfeasance continues. We believe this every time Herr Trump stamps his feet, waves his tiny hands, and decries his sorry estate because of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free.
For a nation that claims that it was founded on the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit, we are doing a damn good job of proving ourselves the world’s greatest hypocrites and despots.
I’m fascinated by bridges, by the things that cause us to cross over, from one place to another. I’m brought to the realization that today, a few thousand miles from home, I’m afforded the right to movement where others, in both America and around the world, are not. I’m reminded that I’m a white, cis-gendered, male in technology, held safe from the clear and present dangers that agitators and dictatorial wannabes are grasping for. I’m aware of my privilege to type these words in a society where “freedom” has become an epithet, where religion has become the sharpened knife threatening bodily autonomy, and where my children are going to struggle to be safe.
Perhaps those bridges we’ve burned, between wisdom, common sense, and community, need to be rebuilt. Perhaps we need to start with a critical look at ourselves and how we contribute to the safety and welfare of others. Perhaps we need to shift away from an ego-centrism, “rugged individualism” mindset that cares only for what’s right in front of our delicate faces, and learn to love again. Perhaps we’d find more in common with our immigrant neighbours if we only took the chance to know them, as we know ourselves.
Build bridges, my friends, and don’t be afraid to cross them to find what’s on the other side. Don’t be afraid of the differences in melanin, dialect, and food; don’t run away from the scents, the chatter, the embrace of communities that look and act different. Build bridges, build relationships, build back what has been lost to time.
May it ever be so.
*The atrocities committed by Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, in the name of whatever god they choose obeisance to, is a lesson in outright fascism and weaponized corruption.
