By Lauren Pinsker
George
Santayana, a Spanish-American philosopher—an expat who spent the last half of
his life in Rome—first recorded the immortal words: “those who cannot remember
the past are condemned to repeat it,” and never in recent history has his apt
proclamation/ condemnation of the human race seem more relevant than it does
today.
As
Americans, we may ask, what is our past?
And it is a relatively simple answer, one taught in our classrooms and
reflected in our mirrors and heard in a thousand different languages being
passed down from generation to generation: America is a Nation of Immigrants. Think of the American Story, the Puritans
that fled Europe seeking freedom—religious freedom—whose blood, sweat, tears,
rough living conditions, and economic opportunities laid the foundation of
America while beginning what would eventually become the largest systematic
genocide in history: today only about 5.4 million US citizens are American
Indians or Alaska Natives, less than 2% of the total population. But I digress… As the new Americans freed
themselves from their evil Monarchic British Empire roots a west coast was at
the same time settled by Iberian Conquistadors, a few of whom were Conversos
(Jews) fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, most of whom sought fame and fortune
and a new world. As time went on more
and more immigrants flocked to America, most of them seeking better economic
opportunities, some desperately fleeing war, some escaping persecution, some
seeking political asylum in the Land of the Free, but all hoping to find better
lives and a new place to call home, and all of them largely unwelcomed by those
immigrants who had gotten there first and were now the “real” Americans. But we ALL come from immigrants, and are
usually proud of the fact, endlessly figuring out and reciting what percentage
of our heritage comes from what Country, telling and retelling family stories of
when so-and-so went through Ellis Island or Angel Island or crossed the country
on the Oregon Trail. Americans are what
we have always been: a nation of immigrants.
“Those Who
Cannot Remember The Past…”
I was deep
in the middle of remembering an especially cherished piece of my own past
history when the sudden realization that “History Endlessly Repeats Itself” hit
me—if not for the first time—than for the first time at 38,000 feet. Since beginning this amazing journey to Rome
for the USF AGI Program, the plight of the refugees waiting to be recognized as
our brothers and sisters has been constantly on my mind, proving difficult if
not impossible to put aside. As I am
sure is typical of such an overwhelming, powerful, positive experience, I am
still both trying to readjust to “normal” life and constantly thinking about
what I’ve just learned and heard and seen and what connections continue from
there. My flight home was uncomfortable
in many ways, physically, emotionally, and not even endless free Bond movies
could calm my thoughts. So I gave myself
a treat: permission to finally read The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James
Brown’s bestselling account of how the University of Washington’s Men’s Varsity
eight-oared Rowing team defeated Nazi Germany’s crew in the 1936 Berlin
Olympics. I was somewhere between the
Polar Circle and the US/Canadian Border and I was mesmerized: after all, I am
[as we say] a recovering coxswain, and was elatedly reliving those two years of
early morning wakeups, freezing mist on the water, workouts and races with my
own boys in our boat, and the various highs and lows of my time as the 2nd
coxswain and only woman (but not Californian) on Pennsylvania’s Men’s Crew. Also as an American, a History Major, and a
Jew, I obviously love any story that has to do with beating Hitler and the
Nazis. Either way, I was completely
engrossed when the following excerpt snapped back my Rome AGI experience to the
forefront of my mind once again:
“On April
14, [1935] the day after the Pacific Coast Regatta on the Oakland Estuary, the
dust storms of the past several years were suddenly eclipsed by a single
catastrophe that is still remembered in the Plains states as Black Sunday. In only a few hours’ time, cold, dry winds
howling out of the north scoured from dry fields more than two times the amount
of soil that had been excavated from the Panama Canal and lifted it eight
thousand feet into the sky. Across much
of five states, late afternoon sunlight gave way to utter darkness… The next
day, Kansas City AP bureau chief Ed Stanley inserted the phrase “the dust bowl”
into a wire service account of the devastation, and a new term entered the
American lexicon. Over the next few
months, as the extent of the devastation settled in, the trickle of ragged refugees
that [one] had witnessed heading west the previous summer became a
torrent. Within a few years, two and a
half million Americans would pull up stakes and head west into an uncertain
future—rootless, dispossessed, bereft of the simple comfort and dignity of
having a place to call home.”[i]
It sounded
cruelly and ironically familiar. Our
forefathers left their homelands for myriad reasons, economic opportunity being
by far the most popular, but all for what we would now argue were good
reasons. And here I was, reading about
how 2.5 million of them migrated again, becoming Internally Displaced Persons
in the process. The only differences
between the migrants fleeing the Syrian Civil War—or indeed any and all people
seeking asylum and refuse in the European Union or similar countries, be they
from Central Africa, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Eritrea,
Somalia, or elsewhere—and the “Average Americans” who witness their daily
struggle for existence on the news from the safety, warmth, and comfort of
their homes are a few generations, the usual cultural misunderstandings that
arise (at first!) when new immigrants arrive, and some basic semantics.
[i] Brown,
Daniel James. (2013). The Boys in the Boat: Nine
Americans and their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The
Penguin Group: New York, New York, USA.
