Can I See Some Identification?

When I was 11 years old my grandparents offered to take me to Florida with them. I had never been on a vacation before, and the idea of traveling was a completely foreign concept to me. I was so excited for the experience you would have thought that the back seat of that Buick was actually a rocket ship heading to the moon.

I sat, impatiently, listing off the the things that I was excited to experience for the first time. Chief among them was seeing my first palm tree.

"Now, don't get your hopes up too high." My grandmother chided. "It's not like the moment we cross the state line some palm tree is just going to be waiting for you. We are still pretty far north."

She was wrong.

In the distance, as we approached the "Welcome to Florida" billboard, I could see it- a beautiful and majestic palm tree;  surely planted by some state employee who had no inclination that his handywork would serve as fodder for the largest and loudest "I TOLD YOU SO" the American South had heard in sometime.

In much the same way, you could notice a distinct change as soon as we crossed the U.S./Mexico boarder yesterday. In a moment I had crossed over from "this side" to "that side". The identities of everything from the roads to the people had suddenly morphed and became, in a word, foreign.

I was reflecting on this as we traversed back to the north to visit the boarder wall today. Distinctions between opposing sides become hyper realized when they are separated by a 30 foot metal barrier. It seems that making distinctions between two groups is the new great American pastime. These days you have to be a Republican or Democrat, gay or straight, for black lives or blue lives, and of course, legal or illegal (God, I hate that word).

In reality, these distinctions we give ourselves are false labels that distort our true identities as Children of God- brothers and sisters of the same divine Father.

Thomas Merton says "Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God doesn't know anything about him...We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves."

And so, my hope for everyone on this trip, for everyone back home, is that we find the moral fortitude, the strength of character, and a true understanding of our eternal identities to the  tear down the hollow walls the separate us, the structures that blind us, and replace them with an understanding that my identity, and yours, can never be defined by something so basic as who is on "this side" or "that side" of a wall.