We found our "We"

In 2010, my daughter, one of her friends, and I traveled to Barcelona, Southern France, and Italy. I greatly admire the architecture of long-established countries, so I was super excited about seeing the works of Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona and the Colosseum and Trevi Fountain in Italy.

Our experiences overall were amazing! But I must say that our experience in Italy was very, very different from those in Spain and France. We had planned to use local transportation to tour parts of Italy on our own. So, we went to the train station to get tickets to go from Naples to Pompeii and saw that other passengers from our ship had the same idea. We watched them go to the ticket counter, only to have the customer service staff close the window on them. We thought perhaps they had gone to the wrong window, so we walked over to a different window, only to have the same thing happen to us not once, but twice. Hmmm. By now, we were all approaching different locals for help. I remember the three of us asking an elderly man who operated a small business stand if he could tell us where we could go to purchase a train ticket. He looked at us with pure contempt and I am sure he cursed us out in Italian. The only word we understood was AMERICANS! We all looked around at each other and really couldn't believe what was happening. There we were, an elderly lady in a wheelchair with her traveling companion, a family of four, a middle-aged couple, and us. All of us were AMERICANS needing the same thing and being denied what we needed because we were AMERICANS.

One of the Americans was able to purchase a ticket from a nearby newsstand and was kind enough to inform the rest of us. Once we entered the newsstand, an employee approached us and helped us with purchasing our tickets. The look on our faces and her knowledge of her community prompted her to act without us saying a word.

From that point, we, all of us Americans, found our “We.” We passed on tips to one another, looked out for one another, and looked around to see if everyone was on the last train or bus back to the ship. The girls, that is my daughter and her friend, made sure they were near the front of the bus or train line so that they could go ahead and hold seats for the elderly lady and her traveling companion. None of us got together to strategize on how we would work together and look out for each other. We simply did. We were Americans and we were all we had.

While on the train ride I thought, Wow! I’ve experienced rejection because I am Black, but I have never experienced rejection because I am an American and I have been around a lot of internationals in my lifetime. Being in a foreign country, seeing my fellow Americans rejected, just as we were, was an eye-opener! Life’s experiences have a way of blurring your vision. When that happens, I think Abba comes and touches your sight as Jesus did the blind man’s in Mark 8:22-25.

“He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village, and when he had spit on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, Do you see anything? And he looked up and said, I see people, but they look like trees walking. Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again and he opened his eyes, his sight was restored and he saw everything clearly.”

I came home seeing myself more clearly. I am an American citizen. A woman of blended ancestry who lives among other Americans; a mélange of ethnicities, cultures, and religions. My government didn’t issue me a lesser than American passport. Everyone’s passport says the same thing.

“The Secretary of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance and in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection.”

I often think about that trip and hoped the experience made an indelible impression on the others as well. I hope they didn’t go home and forget that we were all Americans. We are Americans. I am an American. I am, “We the People.”

Abba,

Forgive us of the trespass of considering Americans of other ethnicities, cultures, and religions different from our own as lesser Americans whose lives and welfare are of less value than other Americans. In all of our differences, help us to find and hold onto our "We" so that we do not destroy ourselves from the inside.