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=> Doesn't this describe all of us well?

Doesn't this describe all of us well?
Posted by Jeff (Guest) jeff@attoz.com - Sunday, November 9 2003, 1:07:25 (EST)
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>After 14 years of living in America I realize I am neither entirely Assyrian nor entirely American. I am like the migrant bird that vacillates from one sentiment to the other despite a season’s demand, collecting along the route songs of all nations. (After all, it is not the color of one’s skin that draws me to a person but the hues, the shades, the intensity of one’s compassion!)
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>Tonight I feel, again, that shifting of cultural identities within me. The Assyrian and the American meet, and the space between them shifts as the forming continents did millions of years ago. Earthquakes! Spiritual tremors.
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>I will not choose one culture over the other. I will not limit myself to one devotion that might imprison me to many prejudices. I want to be—like the sky and the poet—universal, all-encompassing, and sympathetic to all possibilities. I choose the culture of universal and emotional acclimation. America issues me a card, a semi-identity that reads “Resident Alien,” but I know I am a citizen…of hope, of borderless dreams, and of expansive living, loving.

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The author here does an amazing job of articulating his point. I agree with it completely:

In every country that we live in, there seems to be a battle between our nationality and our ethnicity, with religion thrown in, and pride, stubborn pride, "ethno-nationalism" (if that is even a word), and let's not forget the most important, last but certainly-not-least, diclarations.

"Collecting along the route, songs of all nations". If only we could rise above this child-like attitude and insistence for our own plot of land and become, as Farid has said over and over, citizens of the WORLD (not wurld), of the Earth...earthlings.



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