Feel free to skip the below: in sum, the point of this ride is kindness regardless.  

While preparing for this ride, friends, family, and acquaintances have asked great questions, like why are you doing this?  The other day, one asked what do I mean by citizen? When I used that term in a previous post I meant "an inhabitant of a town or city"or "a person who lives in a particular area."  

In a dictionary I received as a gift in 1980, that meaning came first.  Now you'll typically find that sense second to naturalization and legality.  In other words, policy created a new definition for citizen and made it possible for people to be illegal.  

In fact, it was 100 years ago this month that the Johnson-Reed Act passed, establishing specific limits on immigration based on nation of origin.   Before that, in 1790, the Naturalization Act determined that only good, white, male, property-owners enjoyed full rights of citizens.  However, it was after the 1924 Immigration Act that the idea of illegal humans began to creep into our consciousness.   

Many historians date the concept of citizenship to the Greek Empire.  Thousands of years ago, Greeks appreciated their freedom, and slavery was on the rise.  That word, citizen, signified a relationship between a person and their government.  A relationship of mutual protection.  Of course, in Greece, citizens were also white, male, property-owners.  Perhaps one reason the Roman Empire grew larger and lasted longer than the Greek Empire is that Romans offered conquered peoples citizenship (granted, it was imperfect and some historians will take exception to a few assumptions in that statement).

John F. Kennedy reminded us that we are a nation of immigrants, with the possible exception of Native Americans, and, of course African Americans who were brought here involuntarily as slaves.   Still, we passed anti-immigration laws, such as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, section 3 of which reads:

That the following classes of aliens shall be excluded from admission into the United States: All idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, insane persons; persons who have had one or more attacks of insanity at any time previously; persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority; persons with chronic alcoholism; paupers; professional beggars; vagrants; persons afflicted with tuberculosis in any form or with a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease...

It goes on.  Quite a contrast to the poem on the Statue of Liberty by Emma Lazarus, which ends imploring:

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

"Our Invisible Poor," the book review that inspired the War on Poverty, ends with:

The problem is obvious: the persistence of mass poverty in a prosperous country. The solution is also obvious: to provide, out of taxes, the kind of subsidies that have always been given to the public schools (not to mention the police and fire departments and the post office)—subsidies that would raise incomes above the poverty level, so that every citizen could feel he is indeed such. “Civis Romanus sum!” cried St. Paul when he was threatened with flogging—and he was not flogged. Until our poor can be proud to say “Civis Romanus sum!,” until the act of justice that would make this possible has been performed by the three-quarters of Americans who are not poor—until then the shame of the Other America will continue.

Whose shame? Kindness regardless.

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