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Just what are we thinking?

Year before last, I did some genealogical research on my family, and I found that the earliest Roberts I could trace in my family line, emigrated from England to the New World in 1635. Thomas Robert Roberts married Susan Downing in 1642, who also had earlier emigrated from England to the new world, and they settled in or around Ipswich, Massachusetts.

I come from a family of immigrants yet my family's citizenship on this soil predates the original Thirteen Colonies and the subsequent United States of America. After nearly four hundred years, we Roberts's are still living in a land that afforded opportunity to those willing to take on the challenges of leaving the land of their birth for a new land. It is the land that was acknowledged by the French in the 1800's with a gift of the Statue of Liberty, under which are the words, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

The original inhabitants of this land, decimated, ravaged, and near silenced through disease, doctrine, and deceit, seem no longer to lift a cry of complaint, yet us Johnny Come Lately's  appear now to be all wrapped up in the I, me, my, and mine conversation of selfishness. Stinginess cloaked in a garment of fear, security, and a banner emblazoned with 9/11.

We are of the world. We are a global people who make up the populace of this land. We are a place of spiritual freedom, with liberty to have faith, or not, of our own choosing. We are a people who have risen to greatness and now stooped to being petty and selfish.

We have forgotten our roots. Some now place their American-ness as a priority over their Godliness. Some use 'illegal' as if we the people are not the source ourselves of the determination legal, or illegal. It is we the people, not they the government, that gets to say who we are as a nation. We are the government.

It is time for us to all now remember our own global foreign roots. It is time for us to all draw on our own family's historical journeys to opportunity. It is time to remove the boundaries of selfishness, stinginess, and protectionism. It is time to reclaim our greatness as the "Land of Liberty".

No wonder so many are taking to the streets in protest against the recently proposed conservative Republican U.S. House bill that would make illegal entry into the United States a felony. I stand with them (the protesters, that is), though not in protest. I stand with them in being for the global nature of our community. I stand with them for gratitude in the past and present opportunities for my family. I stand with them for generosity to all humans who take on the challenge of seeking liberty, opportunity, and sufficiency. As a universal citizen, I am for honoring the request found below the Statue of Liberty quoted above.

Will you join us? If you will, please contact us using the contact page. Let us know what you are doing, how you are supporting liberty, freedom, and opportunity.

SRR

©2006