Little circles, big circles.

I’ve mentioned before that I have family all over. I don’t remember if I’ve been clear about how widespread that family is. I don’t know if I’ve thought through how much that has shaped my worldview.

I grew up with family in the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, the UK (in both England and Scotland), and the Netherlands. Family friends came from Uganda and India and Tibet. These days, I have family…

…in Chile and Israel too. I think my Turkish family members are mostly based in the US.

I’m pretty damn white, but much of my family is mixed. They are not simply white Americans living abroad. I learned Spanish in part so that I could better talk with more of my relatives.

I have never lived in a world where my family wasn’t widespread. I have never lived in a world where I could draw some neat border and say “anyone outside this line isn’t connected to me.” I knew this as a kid, though I didn’t really understand it. I have a better appreciation of it now.

I do wonder what others think when they see me. I’m not a 1950s Saturday Evening Post model, but when clean-shaven I might fit in with the white men that Trump’s white nationalists glorify. But those white nationalist goons are all about drawing lines on the map and dividing people up. They draw lines right through my family.

I can’t help but think that this truth I’ve known my whole life, that family goes beyond borders, shaped my understanding of what it meant when schools told me they were preparing me to be a global citizen. Perhaps I internalized it differently than my fellow students did. For me, it was obvious that we were already interconnected. I was primed to empathize with those far from me, many of whom I’d never met. I knew that what we Americans did directly impacted others all around the world. I knew that we couldn’t ignore those impacts, nor their repercussions. My family felt them.

The people who tell us that we’re on our own lie to us. The people who tell us that those who don’t look like us are dangerous, they lie to us too. The people who tell us that we need to focus inward and clean out those criminal ‘others’, who tell us that we can’t afford to think about the larger world except to protect ourselves from those criminals… they’re lying to us, and they’re trying to distract us from the ways they’re profiting at our expense.

They’re telling a story about a smaller and smaller circle of ‘good people.’ They’ll keep shrinking that circle until they’re the only ones inside. They’ll burn down whatever they need to in order to keep themselves in that circle and other people out.

That’s a story of little circles, of diminishment, of lack, of decline. We can tell a different story. My family has shown me that.

We can tell a story about ever larger circles, circles of those we can help. Circles of those who might someday help us. Every time we help another, we get bigger, we get stronger. We can grow.

We will stub our toes on new problems and disagreements, but if we keep reaching out, keep helping, we will heal. We don’t need to be stuck in decline if we are willing to make these bigger circles.