America was built on immigration - Read your passport. Stop fearing it.

Have Passport? Will (or Can't or Won't) Travel?
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Do you have a passport? I mean a valid one. Meaning that if you felt like it, you could rock up to your closest airport and catch the next plane to India, China, Mexico, Canada or the Philippines. Because these are the countries where most of the immigrants to the US came from in 2014, when the immigrant population represented 13.3% of the total US population. For the record, and this is the latest estimate for 2016; the Muslim population in the US stands at about 1%. I offer this information to give everyone a sense of perspective about immigration. In the overheated circus tent that the upcoming US Presidential election represents, there’s been a lot of misinformation bandied about as facts. Above are the most current stats available.

Which was why I was curious to discover how many of my fellow Americans, actually have passports. The latest data I could find comes from the US Department of State. Valid US Passports in 2015 is 125,907,176 (39%).

Why did 61% of Americans decide not to be able to leave the US in 2015, if in fact they ever did or ever wished to?

Now, I have held a US passport for almost 40 years but I have never appreciated it the way I do now. I have also lived abroad, off and on, and that might put me in a position to understand the way that America is regarded, across the pond. A perspective, that even if you read broadly and from foreign news report; if you have not spent time outside the US, you will never be able to fully understand. So, if you have never left American shores, you would have no way of knowing that. And I think that’s part of the problem.

Because all those people who have never ventured from the shores of the contiguous US along with Hawaii and Alaska, will never have read the sublime quotations tucked inside the pages of your US passport. Your passport represents a ticket to the world but it also represents an American history lesson, one that I will partially share with you here.

It will remind you that America started as an ambitious, very white, social experiment that soon expanded and willingly provided refuge to basically any and all of the previously huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. Here are ten of the quotes contained in an American passport.

1 "Every generation has the obligation to free men's minds for a look at new worlds...to look from a higher plateau than the last generation...." Ellison S Onizuka: First Asian American/first Japanese to reach space, Buddhist, died in the Challenger, Jan 1986.

2 "It is immigrants who brought to this land the skills of their hands and brains to make it a beacon of opportunity and hope for all men." Herbert H Lehman: Born of German immigrant parentage, Jewish, 45th governor of NY.

3 "A big iron needle, stitching the country together." Jessamyn West: American librarian and blogger, born in 1968. Self described aniti-capitalist.

4 "Liberty is never out of bounds or off limits....wherever it can capture the imagination of men."

EB White: American writer, co-authored Strunk&White's Elements of Style, author of Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little.

5 "The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class - it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity." Anna Julia Cooper: Born a slave, became one of the most prominent African-American scholars and the fourth African-American woman to attain a PhD.

6 "Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people." Harry Emerson Fosdick: Baptist minister who defended his modernist position in his famous Shall the Fundamentalists Win? In that sermon he presented the Bible as a record of the unfolding of God's will, not as the literal "Word of God".

7 "Whatever American hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America." Dwight D. Eisenhower: American general and 34th President of the USA.

8 "We have a great dream. It started way back in 1776. And God grant that America will be true to her dream." Martin Luther King: American Baptist minister, famous for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs.

9 "Let us rise to the standard to which the wise and the honest can repair...the rest is in the hands of God." George Washington: First president of the USA.

10 "And that government of, by and for the people shall not perish from the earth." Abraham Lincoln: Sixteenth president of the USA who managed to preserved the Union, abolish slavery, strengthen the federal government, and modernize the economy before being assasinated....

Inspired? Humbled? America has long been in the business of proving that yearning to breathe free was an excellent, achievable goal. Unless you are a native American, if you are able to make the trip back to any of the countries where your brave forefathers emigrated from, you can begin to appreciate the dynamic cultural forces that have always shaped and are continuing to shape America.

In conclusion, if you’ve got one, go read your passport. If you haven’t got one, think about getting one so that you can stop being afraid of and start learning about the rest of the world. There's less than two more months for this circus to run and it’s time for the humbled and inspired to rally and for those who feel neither, to decide whether they want to rise or to sink. Carlos Santana famously said “Most people don't have that willingness to break bad habits. They have a lot of excuses and they talk like victims.”

Read the quotes again and think. Stop the victim hood. Start acting like you’re American.

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