Allegiance

                 In the late 1980s, a musical made it to Broadway with bad timing.  Chess became a cult classic because of its strong music (long live ABBA!) and powerful message.  However, it didn't last long on the big stage.  

                  You see, the story depended on an "Us vs. Them" mentality of the Cold War, and the Cold War was already fizzling out in 1988.  In the musical, a leading chess star from the USSR defects to the United States when he falls in love with his opponent's second, Florence.  Russian politicians play mind games with her so she will persuade the chess star to return home. In the end, this is a game of Chess that nobody wins.

                      In a moment of heartbreak, the Russian chess champion sings the following Anthem.  Rather than pledging allegiance to a country, he pledges allegiance to his heart.

     I sang this song to myself so many times as a teenager.  I felt like borders were tugging at my heart all the time.  Was my home Junior High or was it High School? Was it High School or was it some yet-unchosen college?   Was it Kansas (where I felt much more appreciated) or New York (where I really lived)?  Was it the quieter home of preadolescence or the more hormonally moody one of my teenage years?  Sometimes I even wondered if I would ever find a feeling of home again. What if I were destined to roam the world forever seeking that perfect coziness that I had lost in growing up?  What if the only home I really would keep was a memory?

      This brings me to a thought that has been very much on my mind this year: all the refugees.  

      I never really considered what happened after disasters before, but after my trip to Auschwitz, I knew how hard it had been for the Jewish refugees who needed a place to go.  Now the word "DP Camp" sets shudders up my spine.  Displaced Person.  Ouch. For many, it would take years before a new home was created.  For many, creating a new home meant refusing to ever speak again about the treacherous theft of old homes and communities.

       Before  I went to the Mideast, I never really thought about the Paletsinian refugees. Descendants of the Palestinians who lived in modern-day Israel during the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate still suffer from statelessness.   They refer to the creation of Israel as the "Nakba", which means disaster.  It wasn't antisemitism which originally led to this catastrophic name; it was a loss of home. 

http://tinyurl.com/jhdpzct

       Now, many Palestinians are double refugees.  560,000 of the Syrian refugees are of Palestinian descent.  Many of them fled Syria only to end up in danger in Lebanon.  So they fled Lebanon to end up endangered wherever they are in the journey for home.

     Look at the girl on the right in the picture.  I see myself in her.  I see my pigtails and my eager skipping.   But she has something I have never experienced.  Zoom into her face.  See the fear.

     My fear was about leaving and losing a beautiful home because I was growing up.

     Her fear is getting caught up in the fire between armed militias.

     She can grow up being made to feel safe, or she can grow up wondering why we as society failed her.  This photo is just a few months old.  And she is just one of many, many children.  She is not an enemy.

      Nor was George Takei.    Last week, I saw his musical, Allegiance, on Broadway.  He dealt with another kind of refugee: the Japanese Americans who were detained in awful situations during WWII.  I have a lot that I'm still processing about his experience (read his book "To the Stars!") and about what I learned from the show and the research I did afterwards.  Expect a longer blogpost on that soon.

     However, after giving up their homes and submitting to several years in concentration camps in the coldest and most flea-infested of conditions, Japanese survivors were handed "a bus ticket and 25 dollars."   Even with inflation, that isn't a lot for starting a life over again.

     Look at his face.  Look at the love and pride and intensity.   Here is a man who took tragedy and prevailed.  He found home again, but used his loss to make the world better.  The cast of the show, also, knows the importance of the play's message.  

    We cannot repeat history.   Let your land's borders only be your heart. Open your heart.  

     Pledge allegiance...to humanity.