COMING HOME
After our ferry docked and we rode the metro to Syntagma Square it was beginning to be dark. In the two days since we were here the square was festooned with Christmas lights and decorations. We walked to the Acropolis View Hotel and were in time to look through the marvelous antique store across from the hotel before going to bed early to prepare to be up at 2:30 to go to the airport.
I slept poorly at the Hotel Acropolis View last night. I sleep poorly before every trip when I know I will have to get up early and plow through a long day. I was in bed by 7:30, awake every hour, and couldn’t sleep after 1 and was up at 2 in order to finish packing and to get to the bus to the airport by 3. After that it was all travel. Susie and I parted at the airport. She flew out an hour later on Lufthansa to Munich and I flew to Amsterdam. We left twenty minutes late but I had asked and been granted help to get to my flight to Athens in Amsterdam and so was relaxed. Until there was no record of my getting help and I had to move as fast as I could which is a kind of quick plodding. I thought in the huge airport that the flight was from Gate D5, but got there and it was E5, a long stretch away. I got there, winded and dragging, two minutes before the gate closed. And here I am about to land in Atlanta after three then nine hours in the air with one hour in the air from Atlanta to Asheville with the hope that I can get an earlier flight and don’t have to sit 4 1/2 hours for my scheduled flight, which will be 1 a.m. Athens time.
But something has been growing on me during the last few days as I read about a far right anti immigrant candidate winning in the Netherlands this week and Mike Johnson vowing to seal the border tight because his MAGA followers are afraid of immigrants.
For two months I have been unable to understand the languages spoken around me, new languages spoken on every flight, immigrants sitting on both sides of me in the plane. The Italians in Sicily were so friendly, Efi and the other Greeks I met in Paros were so friendly. The world has shrunk so much that we are all cheek to cheek, almost pressed against each other. On top of that we in the USA are a nation of immigrants, except for the Native Americans whom we have never fully accepted even after displacing them. What in the world are we afraid of? We somehow think we can build walls and keep separate from each other even as the walls are disappearing and we are getting more and more connected.
The people who are most afraid of immigrants rarely know any. What is going on. It is nuts. What are we afraid of? If we would just listen to people who are different from us in small ways we would be enriched in the same way that I felt enriched in Hydra and Paros and Letojanni on this trip and the way that Warren Wilson College students felt enriched when the college was one quarter overseas students. Bigotry is a very strange kind of blindness that comes from refusing to see, refusing to listen, refusing to accept. Right now, to me, the anti immigrant hysteria seems comic, laughable even, and yet this fear is so serious and the politicians building the hysteria so hateful. It is probably as simple as tribal identity and fear of otherness and is probably built into our DNA, but it still seems nuts to me.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 