McAir

The first time I flew overseas, I was 19 and flying with my working class boyfriend from Brooklyn, which meant we were already connected before we stepped foot on the plane. His older brother had a union job at Aer Lingus, the Irish airline, because of his Irish roots. We'd been regaled with funny stories at their local bar in Bay Ridge about the comic misadventures of the shanty set, a colloquialism derived from the derogatory term for low class Micks who're "Shanty Irish", as it relates to their less-than-stellar housing situations. Irish "on the dole" live in sponsored housing just like here, called "Council Flats"; a mindset reflected in their cumbersome responses to international flight, as well.

We'd already heard from his brother Doug about the neighborhood guy he booked on a cheap flight as a favor, who'd stuffed as many American-made jeans as he could into a bunch of garbage bags that he crammed into the plane's overhead compartments, only to be foiled by the physics of storage that found his loot exploding into the aisle before being escorted off the plane by security, because illegal contraband is in violation of several international laws. He'd sheepishly explained to them that good jeans were hard to find in Ireland, and at the late 80s price of $10-25 a pair (depending on the buyer), he'd be sure to make a killing that'd sponsor several flights back and forth.

Ya, right? It was true, too. Levi's jeans were a thousand times better than the tacky, cheaply-made, thinly-fabricated knock-offs available to foreign markets at the time, with their poorly placed pockets and overly long pants legs that scraped the ground to become tattered around the cuffs rather early on. They just didn't look right, especially on Europeans. We'd been, in a word, "prepped" for our experience beforehand, and our fellow fliers did not disappoint us on this first, uniquely Celtic crossing.

After being seated, I'd already seen the most handsome Catholic priest in collar I'd ever seen in my life; a beautiful blond boy barely in his 20s, young-looking like us. Whew...Irish clergy were different. His brother Doug had a nice surprise waiting for us, too. He'd tried to bump us "up" into First Class, but the stewardess told us Brian Dennehy, the well-known American actor, had already been seated there, as she handed us a couple of Mimosas. Ah, best to be careful about it, then. With that, we were already plugged into local gossip. She said it was being told that Mr. Dennehy was looking to buy a pub in Dublin (the big stars do that as investments, like Bono from U2), and a potential deal that could be so financially favorable was to be supported by all of us, especially if we were keen for an economic boost, which we were.

As nervous a flier as I can be during long flights with turbulence, I'd never felt safer than I was on that flight, bolstered as we were by a large gaggle of nuns seated in coach with us. Surely, G-d won't knock us out of the sky with this many clergy on board? And you know what? He didn't! It was a smooth ride until the prop plane trip to Amsterdam, but even the weather gods can't do much about that. Like my first time to Italy, I swore as we left on our returning flight from Galway that I'd be back to Ireland, and I'm proud to write that I kept my promise, even at great expense to myself. Would you expect any less? I wouldn't. To you and yours on this special Irish holiday month, and for every day after. Be safe.

Proud to be a N*gga

My cousin Kenny is proud to be a n*gga, because he's told me that more than once, even singing it to me like this: "...bee-cause I'm proud to be a niggggaaaah!" His cellphone used to have a recording of him singsonging "Kennndaahhhl!" every friggin' time it went to voicemail, which drove my ex-boyfriend crazy, because John would need help at the yard and "Ken Doll" couldn't be bothered; exactly what we'd come to expect from a fat, bald, 6'1, Celtic-Jewish-Indian like him.

He never wanted to fit in with the 9-5 crowd, and for years, he struggled to find work that was inoffensive to his cocktail party persona, before he finally settled on joining a pipe-and-drum band near the beach. He's good at it, too! He and his then-girlfriend (now wife) played together at the biggest parades 'round the way, turning their alcoholism into a somewhat respectable McOpportunity. It wasn't what I'd want for him, but he's made a life from the broken shards of his rough Brooklyn upbringing that's left most of his family dead, and he's not even 50, yet.

I just hope someday he'll realize he doesn't have to jettison parts of his identity that he feels he needs to hide in order to fit in with typical American society, because I personally know of a clan that would dearly love to have a musician with the heart of an Irishman, the beat of an Indian, with the soul of the faithful play at their tartan-clad family gatherings on a certain New Scotland beach. We pay with real money, too. My father always used to tell us as kids that we should be proud of who we are, because it's not like we had a say in the matter, and he's right. We don't. It's already happened.

Remember, my Americans: the freedoms you take for granted have not been equally extended. Some of us can't even walk on ancestral lands and feel proud about it, without someone else looking to take it away to sell it back for a fee. Think about that while you bitch about the line at the polls, or your simple black-and-white racism, or any of the other issues that you think take precedence over basic human rights like dignity and equality. We're not there, yet with this country, but some of us would really like it to be. They're colored, too, just not like you.

Ms. Haiti

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty_pageant# 

Magdala was nerve-wracking for me to be around, a feeling that was soon shared by the entire small family business that hired her. She's tall, smart, pretty, and cultured; in short, she is exactly like every other gainfully-employed woman working in Manhattan and its environs, which caused her an enormous amount of distress. In Queens, she was just another Haitian-American, but something happened to her during her long subway commute into the city. She began to have dreams and visions of her self that she could market and sell to us as her co-workers, which was the exact job description she had, as so many of the marketing/acquisitions/sales staff who function as our support personnel and in-house cheerleaders. She is, to be succinct, a fan of mine, without being a friend or even particularly friendly.

At the time of her hire, she was "engaged" (or "enfianced" in Magdala's irritating patois that was designed to be "exotic") to a short, bland, and rather unattractive French man who's also a single father, which was absurd. She was better-looking than him, and as pretentious as she could be, that tall black girl ain't never gonna be no damn Parisian white girl, knowwhatimsayin'? Too many big white teeth in that large head of hers. She's "bougie" as fuck, fellas, but to so many Euros who drank the waters deeply from our American import t.v. show that now reads like a prolonged tampon commercial about boring yentas living (and sexing) in the city, she was just the ticket he needed to take to New York and our lifestyle here, like a pretty tour guide on his payroll.

His daughter was disastrous for her, too. She was blond, petite, and Euro-pretty, which means she missed her French "maman" the way I miss really good baguettes and appropriately-named croissants livin' in the 'burbs. Oh, well. Ain't nuthin' but a thang, right? Whereas the little Chinese girl of our house bookkeeper spoke broken baby "Engwish" to me and wiggled onto my lap in a record-breaking couple of seconds the first time she ever met me, this carefully-dressed girl of eight or nine spoke haltingly and bristly to a very nervous, buck-toothed, skinny older girl of about 28-34, also over-dressed for her role as part of our sales staff.

She was obsessed with her looks, too, making sure she rushed into my office to tell me "the good news" about her lunchtime experience with a former model's outdoor staff working the line around the block for her t.v. talk show in the nearby studio, asking her to stand in line for hours to try-out for the star's main show about amateur "would-be" models. Again, I was nonplussed as a native New York girl. Well, yeah, sure. You're tall and skinny enough. I mean, that's where it starts nowadays, before attractiveness and beauty. Fit the tiny clothes, first. Them little rich kids in Hollywood diet all the time. Also, how good do you look in pictures? She went into a fretful paranoia right after her initial bout of giddiness, which is not a good sign for any industry, particularly the extra competitive ones. My queries to her were brief and direct, because any really good art director knows I just don't have time for it while I'm on the clock.

She was less sure about her photogenic qualities ("Well, take some pictures. You have a camera, right?"), and her "prominent mole" (honestly, I hadn't noticed) that she felt sure would make her fodder for the people on the show. Well, that and her age. "Oh, they'd just choose me to 'make fun' of me." Yeah, well, if that's your attitude, then modeling isn't for you, because if this little brush-up freaks you out (where it's all about how you look and what doesn't look right), then the actual business of modeling is out because of your sensitivity to perceived criticisms, so I guess publishing was a better choice for you. End of story. I mean, really, where could you go with it? Rehabs are filled with insecure girls waiting for their next big break. Be a scholar!

But, of course, she was massively problematic in our equally competitive book program, questioning her every decision with an infamous defensiveness that was even more offensive when spoken in her hackneyed "Franche" accent that she put on for show. She was a generic drama queen, which is the absolute kiss of death in a town filled with the real deals "trodding the boards" never-so-lightly each and every night. An egotistical diva who doesn't make art...what the fcuk is that? I had no idea what to do with her in our company, and soon my co-workers filed complaint after complaint about her attitude, too. She was snippy and disrespectful, even "on paper" in our in-house emails, and keeping track of the written word is what we do best. Poor thing. She was on a short clock with us.

Within fairly quick succession, she broke up with her "Fiancee" (we weren't impressed enough by her overt "bling", I guess), had a bad affair with an actual good-looking Frenchman with his own media company who soon got his other French (and white) girlfriend pregnant right before Magdala quit our outfit to go work for him in Paris, but she didn't care. She was going to be "a star", baby! With his over-priced "Breakfast at Tiffany" books that were Euro-friendly and arty enough for his snobby coffee-table audience? Yeah, right. 

But, things had been going downhill for awhile. She began showing symptoms of our temperamental publisher's typical firing arc: too many sick days taken without advance notice, eating quickly through his 50/50 health insurance for her bad teeth and multiple gum surgeries brought on by anorexia and bulimia (that raises some red flags, even in New York, as a notorious food town), and then her too-gossipy friendship with our ferociously evil Jewish secretary sealed her fate at the business, forever, all of which I had warned her about during her first few months of employment.

At a company and a town as fucked up as Manhattan, not even a wanna-be media type like the kind who hides months without lunches, punctuated by the occasional fast food binge that's stuffed hurriedly into her mouth for publicity's sake in the company's kitchen (on recommend as a political tactic by the daft-idiot white-blond yenta aggressively manning the front desk) can sneak past us. Yeah, bitch. We know. It didn't work out the way you thought it would. Fantasies can be like that, though: brutal and cruel and quick, kind of the way I imagine most beauty pageants and their contestants are. In real life, I mean. Not theirs. Ours. The real thing. Living a real life is the only true thing we have on this earth, girl. Get some before it's gone.


For Mr. and Mrs. Jay, of "ANTM" fame: yeah, girl,  I saw you scoping me on the down-low while you was underground during my daily subway commute, wit ya reared-back head and "dah-yummmm, 'cuse me!" look on yo' face and your seven foot frame dressed in all black pretending to clutch at invisible pearls. I do know I look that good. And Mr. Jay, ain't nobody incognito at 6'5 with silver-blond hair gelled into spikes walking around Chelsea. That was an "off" day for me visually, BTW. I was on break from the office getting a lunchtime walk after too many years eating at my desk. Feel me? Yeah, you do. I know fellas too scared to approach a lady, even plush "shorties" like me :) Bahaha! Booyah!

"B" for Berkowitz

Having names in America is a tricky business. Many of our ancestors came here with an eye towards reinvention, which made it the perfect opportunity for a name-change. No matter how many times I'm asked, it still makes me smile: "Is Doucette 'French'"? Oh, hell no. "Doucet" is French as all get-out, but "Doucette" is a totally American creation, reflecting our past desires for assimilation and fitting in. Quickly. It's a dangerous prospect for an immigrant not to pass as an American citizen for very long. We know too many cultures of the world not to be hip to foreigners.

Belonging here is mostly a matter of choice that's not from any particular country, culture, ethnicity, or religion, related more to geographic proximity to the nearest overseas nation than anything else. San Francisco has a large Asian district because it is a western hub for Americans traveling to Japan. Miami has a vibrant Cuban community because of its relative close distance to that country; ditto with generations of Haitian boat people who landed in Florida. I can fly to Ireland from New York quicker than to any other major European country (besides Greenland and Iceland) and most American cities, which directly informs the strength of the Celtic-informed cultures of my ancestral home of "New Scotland" and the Northeastern seaboard.

But for parts of my family, their move towards an American identity was more circuitous and convoluted, with large doses of deceit mixed with insincerity. It was the perfect combo for my cousin and my old friend from college. Dave came from a Polish-American father with a phony Irish-sounding name, and both of them are heavy drinkers, just like their fathers before them. They briefly played together in a downtown darts league (my boyfriend and my two cousins who are siblings), until they blew that by fighting in the cobblestone streets of downtown New York City late at night, after one too many.

Still, we were blown away by the reveal that my cousin had changed his name without even telling us. He invited us to a party held by an Irish association that's a popular social club for many Irish-Americans, one necessitating proof of Irish ancestry, which was much harder than he could manage with a dark Indian mother who resembled Pocahontas more than Colleen. That was his gentile line from his maternal side: a mother with more native heritage than anything else, and she'd die an early death in his 20s from the drink before she'd openly divulge the truth about her ethnic origins.

We approached the table at the social club with the guest list, repeating my cousin's name a few times, only to get puzzled looks and shaking heads. Nope. He wasn't on the list! My cousin must have saw us from inside the banquet hall, because he yelled out as he ran over to us: "It's under 'Burke'!" Uh, duh. You could have told us you made the reservations in our name. How were we to know? He quickly checked us in, then pulled us aside. We didn't understand him. He didn't go by the name Berkowitz anymore. Okay...we were still waiting. He got impatient with us."You need an 'Irish' name to get into the club!" Haha! That's funny, 'cause Dave isn't even all that Irish. He's a Polish-Indian mixed with German and Italian.

No, no, no. We still didn't get it. Finally, he coughed up the truth. This time, he leaned in closer to us, seated across from him at the long banquet table with fresh beers, lowering his voice. "I changed my name." What?! Dave was furious with him. "You stole my fucking name so you could drink in a bar?!" Kenny wanted to bartend (i.e., drink for free) at the local chapter, so he felt it was worth it. Besides, it fit his personality perfectly to be a such an outrageous liar, but this was just so fucking surreal. I loved our Jewish family from my father's side. This was bullshit! It was like he cut off an entire branch of our big family tree, and we were bleeding all over the place from the cut. Fuck...what a dumb drunk fuck!

Dave jerked his thumb at me. "She's the one with the Irish grandfather, not you. And besides, she's been to Ireland. You haven't." And that was true. "Yeah, you're 'more Irish' than me." My cousin admitted to us. "That's true." It was a dubious distinction amid so many loud red faces that packed the Brooklyn hall. Uh, yeah, we're not exactly extinct, are we? Take a good look around. Still, he had a point. He was as European-American as probably half the fuckers in the joint, and he could drink most of them under the table any day or night of the week. Heck, genetics is a wild game. Maybe that big dumb fuck was onto something. Maybe he was an Irishman more than anything else all long. It was still funny, though: an Irish Norman name of French origin, stolen from an upstate Polish-Indian. It was just crazy enough to be American. 

Mad Man

My dad absolutely hated working in the city, even though he'd beat the odds against poverty and a "lowly" ethnic background with a supposed "mixed birth" in his ancestry that plagued him wherever he went, because that's the reaction his last name elicits. He was been born in Rhode Island before moving to a farm in Maine with a little red schoolhouse down the road apiece, which lent an idyllic air to the surrounding countryside, if not his actual home rife with spats of violence and severe alcoholism. His family sold the farm and moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, which probably seems to you like the cruelest joke to be played against a young boy, and you'd be right.

He never really got over the change of pace they'd made to be closer to the family who'd help a single mother like my grandmother, even though every place he lived afterwards would never quite measure up to our fair city, because he retained a grudge against New York City from the strife he endured. I totally understood. I hated Rockland County as a kid, mostly because of the viciously competitive yentas of New City who liked to constantly remind us—through their spoiled brats at school—that we were considered lower than them, they who were destined to become doctors and layers, and failing that, dentists and chiropractors. They'd threaten to sue.

Unlike other typical "white" childhoods, we never really passed muster the way outsiders might think we did. Yeah, you had your definite skin tone and features that placed you squarely within a solid group of other "minorities" (and that status has always been highly suspect to me, though not the subsequent abuse and racism after many Americans emigrated, whether voluntary or not), because we still proudly carried our last names and distinctive features. It don't pass notice 'round the way, trust on that, and it always starts out the same way, too, albeit deceptively innocently: "Oh, is your last name 'French'?", in a pseudo-airy style. Of course, they don't really want to recognize European conquerors and other unwanted invaders to someone like me.

Then, they (my purposefully distracted audience) pretend that our real ethnic story is so hard to understand (or dull), that it's quickly followed by theirs. My dad had trouble from the very beginning in the city, because everything about him was wrong. He wasn't Italian, or Irish, or Puerto Rican, or black, which are much easier ethnics for average urban Americans to assimilate.

It became the first conversation that our attackers learned to avoid with us, which they would only signal when hard-pressed with something vague like, "there's something 'different' about you", becoming white code for "I know you're better than me and I'm a fuck-up, but I'm crazy, so if I admit you that to you, then you 'own' me". Well, yeah, kinda. By my rights. The thing is, me and my friends all had it rough, and we couldn't explain our parents crazy on just some po' oppressed n@gro story, feel me? We were all considered lowly downtrodden ethnics, be it a loud Dominican, or drunk Irish, or a greasy guinea (all those "dark" kids runnin' around yellin', ugh...Catholics), or Africans, or my "Half Breed" cousins.

It made him want to reinvent himself at every opportunity, and combined with his learning difficulties and sometimes serious cognitive impairments, it left him feeling extremely prone. He told me half-truths about joining the navy at 17 because his home life was "so bad", when in truth, his drunk dad had left many years ago, to be replaced by my loving, gentle Italian-American grandfather who stayed with my grandmother for the rest of her life. His cousin (also a serious drunk) told me he was on the reserve list before he was enlisted, and I knew what that meant. My dad doesn't make the cut right away, or sometimes at all, which he hides out of an embarrassment and fear that never seems to go away, no matter how much money he has.

He also told me that he was in a gang, and the way my dad gambles and works the pool table tells me the rest of the story about his greaser past as a small-time hood. Like his papa, his mama probably pushed him into the military, in yet another attempt to dry up one of her folk from dying, but unfortunately the military does cure disease. He said his "best friend" was electrocuted for murder as a teen, after a knife fight in an alley went wrong. Like most of his family, it was fucking crazy enough to be true, because we have/had hard-bitten convicts doing serious time in my family. It might be right.

And so, he did what millions of American men have done, since the start of our military: he flipped money from the G.I. Bill into an education, because he found a real mentor in his Naval C.O. He hated military life, but he loved the results, so he set out to remake himself into an American ideal, like the old black-and-white movies he used to escape a rough home life or the troubles he causes, preferring to sink into a dark movie theater cooled with air conditioning that he didn't have at home, so he could check out of reality for awhile. He always carries around this deep sense of need wherever he goes, you know what I mean? Like, a deep sadness settles over him and whatever evil he thinks he's done that he can't quite recover from in a really honest way. It may not even be real, the depth of his pain, but in his mind, it is.

It didn't really hit home for me until I saw the first few episodes of the t.v. show "Mad Men", a show about so many striving city people of his generation looking to ditch their identities for fake ones that Madison Avenue churned out for them in a siren song. It was alluring for them, escaping a reality that hated them for who they were. Everyone and everything had to change to suit some commercial sameness. After watching every episode, I felt an pit in my stomach that was backed up by my mom's impressions, too, and she totally sucks at media. "Yeah", she said to me, "that's exactly what it felt like back then." She paused, "G-d, what are horrible time it was." And it was. People hid anything that they thought was "bad", or less likely to sell in a corporate marketplace, like their homosexuality or their ethnic roots, to be white-washed with the latest lead-based paint or cosmetics that passed FDA approval.

I remembered it in bursts during my own bus commutes, battling homelessness and starvation; his pressing of hot spoons in the mornings to clear up sinuses he always complained were made worse with stress, his heating pad treatments and cookie binges that left him prone on the sofa while we attended church services with our mother. When he did attend, he never mouthed any of the words to our liturgical services, before he finally left the faith for an easier version that he was raised to believe was utter blasphemy in its creation against the church of Jesus Christ. Some protest.

That was just his "downtime". He'd take us into the office for weekends when my mother didn't want us around, so me and my brother could draw pictures on old office papers and eat sugar cubes from the kitchenette area for coffee breaks taken during the work week, after we'd done a thorough search of the office drawers for candy and gum. He got his suits custom-tailored at a Wallach's store in the old Nanuet Mall by this short Jewish guy with a measuring tape around his neck who had his measurements on an index card in the back of the store. I loved it, because it was like attending an exclusive gentleman's club, with expensively-tufted leather chairs and the smell of good fabric hanging on every rack.

He hated every minute of the weird head games and strange office politics, even as he was complicit in the same type of crimes against the public trust, through every deal he'd do that put him deeper into a moral hole that followed him before and after the city that gave him his first family. I felt (and still feel) sad for the lost boy he is, even as I hate(d) his abuses against us. May this weekend, and every weekend after, find him peace, as well as for all the sufferers of the unfair, the unjust, the sick, and the poor of spirit. May they inherit the earth through their humility. This mother knows it firsthand.

I Write the Book (Everyday)

 

For working class people like myself, our productivity serves as the vocation that directs and guides our lives, because labor is the greatest conduit to self-determination that we have. It was a really hard concept to describe to the average Americans I met earlier in life, like the feeling behind mia famiglia*, a shared closeness that bonds New Yorkers on a deeper level than your average cul-de-sac couple, because if you don't figure out how to live on top of one another in a small tenement flat with a shared bathroom on every other floor, you're fucked for life. You might just kill someone on the next "bad" day!

Much like our advanced solutions for recycling and re-purposing, our island nation began with limited space that demanded excellent and immediate solutions. While other Americans buried their toxic trash in empty fields that they hoped would just disappear like so much dust under a carpet, we were forced to live with our garbage strewn everywhere, as the price we paid for our failure to adapt. There was simply nowhere else to go. Our limited shared spaces created some funny dynamics, like the floating garbage barge denied docking pretty much everywhere (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobro_4000), and the infamous prison barge for our society's over-spill of convicts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_C._Bain_Correctional_Center).

When you can't take the train without a deep feeling of paranoia because the homeless drug addicts outnumber the people of the everyday working world, you've got a big problem, and when you can't walk down the street without the rank smell of a two-week pileup of garbage during the hottest season of the year (ah, August in the city...), you kinda want to solve those problems as quickly as possible. And so, we did. In the process, we became the world leader for innovation, adaptation, flexibility, and real change, because we had to. It's hard, and it's entirely human. But, on any given day, you'd find just as many working class people like me encountering the same situations with solutions already in hand (and cheaper than yours to implement, Baby Boomer) right now.

So, we waited. And waited. And then, we waited some more, for you to catch up to a reality that you check(ed) out of regularly with t.v., booze, pills, shopping, junk food, and whatever else the "idiot box" sells you, because you can't cope with the world you made—and then destroyed. Thanks for that, by the way. I heard one of the designers from the home-based reality show "Queer Eye for the Straight Eye" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_Eye) joke that he'd simply become the maid service for a bunch of dysfunctional shut-ins, and it was easy to see why. "You know your apartment needs cleaning when you have air fresheners plugged into every outlet", was the most direct way one of the designers could explain the concept of "clean" to a drooling chronic case of angst.

For me and my hard-working friends, the class system was completely different than the false realities sold to us in college and on the job through popular t.v. shows and movies. There were no more "blue collar" or "white collar" designations anymore. We were left with those who can, and those who can't, with a million problems needing solutions, and all of them were yours, not ours. In order to live, we had to solve your alcoholism and indifference for you, by managing it better than you did, with your greater share of power and money. In short, we became the ruling class from every great time in history, like the samurai warrior class of Japan, or the enslaved architectural scribes of Ancient Egypt. Because we had to. We had to work our way out of it. We simply had to. We have to work. There is no other choice.

Work for me has always held the power of self-determination, as the ability to rise above the shitty overblown titles of the inept office worker, or the ineptitude behind the egotistical fast-food restaurant manager, doomed for a life of gruelingly repetitive banality. Anything but this. That's how we felt about it. Anything must be better than this. And we were right. It was. Our lives were/are so much better than the people in our families that we grew up with back then. I always describe my group ethos as thus, for our motivation: I don't want to die. That was/is our motto. SO inspiring, right! Yeah, sure. It's a great bestseller, if you package it for demented retards. We rose above the labels and strata of the American Dream, because the fantasy was never real for us. We became the work, and in the process, we began to rule the world. Through popular vote, of course. What else is there?

Pope Francis Verified account ‏@Pontifex

People are the primary artisans of their own development, the first in charge!

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* la mia famiglia. my family.  

Exiled on Main Street

Being an exile in your own land is a strange experience. People descended from more recent émigrés to our beautiful land here don't know (or understand) my last name. I've already had to spell it out twice today while explaining its long heritage, in this small hamlet that is rather fluent in "immigrant" (as is most of the New York area), so you can imagine what the rest of the country (and by extension, the world) is like for us. We need better publicity!

The land of "Acadia" pre-dates the creation of the current borders that divide the United States and Canada (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acadia), much like my sophisticated Norman ancestors (pre-dated by my ancient Greco/Roman/Mesopotamian ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Roman_world) dominated Europe through trade and their cultured abilities to connect with the local people around them, wherever there may be around the globe, much like I do today. That does not mean that I have that state of awareness reflected back to me often, resulting in my infamously patient temperament I learned to develop, lovingly guided by my grandparents.

"You're gonna learn all about patience now!", was something my grandmother told me more than once, in recognition of those greater gifts that need much more extensive (and slower) explanation to the crowd gathered around me. Leadership is not easy, and like any great educator, repetition is a big part of our toolkit. Publishing is rife with trends in the human experience that need more than one or two nuanced marketing niches to accurately describe content to an interested audience, and that could be just a single genre.

We like to research by looking at a subject from all angles, then pick the entry point we think you can plug into the easiest, so as to enhance your comprehension as you move forward, with or without us. But, how do you do that with a people who were cast out, dispersed, and strewn around so as to prevent a congregation of support from building a case for us that we were supposed to make for you? You're reading it now, and how many years has it been? It seems backwards, doesn't it? That's how long it's taken for me to unfold our red carpet ride through history for you, with its complexities and various moving parts.

Today I am grateful to have this public forum that reintroduces you back to us as a concept in these modern times as your loving ancestors; marginalized, impoverished, and beset as we have been. Rest assured, my dear majority, we have always been here for you. Sometimes a minority group is small for its precious rarity, not for its insular exclusion, and so I ask you to rethink your rigidly guarded boundaries done quickly and incorrectly, to be carefully redrawn by the people who came here to lead the way back home, not block the passage of others seeking to enter. Are you worthy of us? Are you worthy of Acadia? I hope so, because we're here to stay. That's our “forever” promise to you, as our beloved descendants.

∞

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_%28utopia%29 

∞