Americana

One  - one - copy of a remarkable document survived the Holocaust: the minutes of the Wannsee Conference at which the Final Solution was delineated and pledged to. I became aware of this reading The Folded Clock - an unusual diary/memoir by the author Heidi Julavits. 

The document outlines in great detail - like board game rules  -  who will be allowed to live and die; how they will be moved; who will kill them; where they will be killed. (Like Thomas Jefferson before them, every effort is made to have their ultimate evil deeds done at their direction, but outside of their view.)  Some "mixed-bloods" can be saved by their attachment to a "German". However, even they will be killed if they look like a Jew or act like one.

It got me thinking about this mash-up of nationality with genetics and religion. In Nazi Germany, a Jew could not also be a German.  How is this? Is this what explains the blindness to Colin Kaepernick's patriotism? Or the refusal to acknowledge Dreamers as Americans in every way except on paper? 

Current events have prompted many to ask what an American looks like. But in this we have a question that has no answer because being an American is a state of mind. My being an American is not tied to the texture of my hair or my spiritual beliefs. Nor is it contained by the boundary of 50 states. Wherever I go, I will be one. Wherever I came from, I am one. Which must mean that anyone can become one - wherever they came from, whatever they look like. It simply must.