"Homeland"

       Wrote this essay closer to the time the word first became prominent in the country.  The muse and thoughts I had then still seem to me to be pertinent regarding this almost-taken-for-granted word now:


                                                HOMELAND

       The term “Homeland” as in “Homeland Security” has bothered some people, including me.  Others seem to accept it readily.

       It was apparently first used in an American government context by a 1997 document of the National Defense Panel, then as part of the two-word phrase in the first Hart/Rudman report on national security in 1999, but most notably to the general public in President Bush’s October 2001 creation of an Office of Homeland Security which has now received its Congressional imprimatur in November 2002.

      The term, perhaps for one old enough, resonates from World War II and Hitler’s Germany.  Naturally the sound of it is not favorable for somebody with that association.

       But it’s what the term does (and maybe what it did for Germany!) that bothers me most:  it makes us into an isolated patch of soil in which we are all rooted, apart from the rest of the world.

       What happens to the “homelands” to which most of us trace our ancestry, i.e., the now widely disparate countries that gave us or our forbears their birth?  Those countries are cut off from contributing to our culture and our identities as we float ever further from our peculiar, distinct, and diverse origins.

       WE are now the “homeland,” barricaded and armored away from the rest of humanity, thus giving the lie to our welcoming and immigrant-built country, subverting our very appeal to the world.