Refuge
I have often wondered what it takes to really feel that a place is yours and that you belong to it. A large percentage of the world’s population ends up in a different place than the place they were born, some 244 million people, according to the Pew Research Center. Some are voluntary migrants, but a substantial number are refugees who have left their countries to flee violence, persecution or war. In the United States we like to say that we all originally came from someplace else, meaning our ancestors did, not necessarily we ourselves. Americans whose ancestors came here generations ago do not see themselves as refugees or immigrants. They boast about the fact that their families have been here for generations, as though that is a personal achievement. There are societies they can belong to if their ancestors came on the Mayflower or fought in the Revolutionary War and so on. In Colorado where I live, people could get vanity car license plates that proclaimed them t