CHAPTER THREE

Well, first, it’s my own experience. Being forced to leave home at an early age to save myself. Leaving everything I knew, the world I loved. And then being exiled for almost two years from fourteen to sixteen on Hart Island, the home to Potters Field. 
Of course, being half Jewish probably has a lot to do with writing this song as well. I was raised on Fiddler On The Roof. And the song Anatevka haunts me to this day. The Holocaust was a running history in my mind from my earliest memories.
And then my very early years growing up both in the South and the North and understanding the horror of slavery, in the way a small child can, then a teenager and later as an adult. Seeing quite early, in my own home, that many Americans would not face it. That people in my immediate family were living in an alternate reality of the lost cause. 
In school, I began to grasp the tragedy of our Native American First Peoples history. Horrifying. It’s a strange history, our American story. The people who live here now have so many different pasts behind them. That’s our great experiment. I love our country so. But it breaks my heart. Like having a mother who can’t stop drinking. It is the saddest story ever told. With the boldest beginning. But the darkest flaw is in our making. 

It’s funny to me, that with all the thousands of years of original sin conceptually, we never seem able to apply it to ourselves in the most important matters of state. Like a childlike patient on a psychiatrist’s couch, we can’t move forward. We can’t see ourselves. We can only project the fear and shame from our past failures onto the people we have failed the most. And the new people who need us now.

That we are listening. That we have suffered. That we can imagine their suffering. And we want it to end.

A map, a plan, a distant land
It tears me from my home
I miss my old world
Need my old world
Long for my old home

I have felt displaced since I was forced to leave my own home. I was never able to resume my old life. Left out to sea. Never feeling at home again. That led me to feel how other people might experience their lives now and in the long lost long agos.
On Passover we talk about being the stranger, of being kind to the stranger, of how we can all be strangers in a strange land. Here, in America, we have made people who were here before us, strangers. We dragged people here in chains hundreds of years ago, people who have been here now much longer than most of us, and we have kept them strangers in their own land. Strangers to the rights of full citizenship. Strangers to a country that never loves them.
I understand what it feels like to be born into a family that doesn’t love you. In a world that keeps insisting that it isn’t true. To a mother who doesn’t love you. When the world says mother’s always love their children. That was the first lie. And why it was so easy for me to see the next one. And the one after that.