While pedaling my bike through a nearby neighborhood, I saw a homemade sign someone had set up at an intersection. A wooden post held eight vibrantly painted boards pointing like arrows in various directions, each board displaying the word “home.”
I parked and observed the sign from every angle, struck by its powerful message: Home is everywhere. No matter what direction we travel, literally or metaphorically, we’re close to home.
During this pandemic, “home” feels even more welcoming than usual. Our home is a safe place, away from the relentless virus. The threat of infection has been climbing in places where people left their homes too quickly for risky interactions at parties, restaurants, bars — even idiotic political rallies.
The security of home assumes access to a welcoming place. How many people aren’t safe at home because of abuse, neglect, or rejection? Even one is too many. And a safe home implies any home at all. Homelessness, especially during a pandemic, might be the most dangerous and difficult life a person can live.
Then I noticed that the top arrow of the sign was different. Showing two words that I spoke aloud: “Go home.” Those words sounded like an imperative, even a command. And they sounded sadly familiar. For generations, women in the workplace were told to “go home.” Some still are. Many immigrants have been hearing “go home” since the beginning of our nation. Refugees fleeing violence and persecution are met today at our border with official orders to “go home.” Those orders mock the welcome embodied by the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor …”
“Go home” sounds strikingly like Donald Trump’s words to four minority women members of Congress whose main offenses seemed to be varying shades of brown skin and calling out Trump’s rejection of core American values. “Go back,” the president tweeted, even though three of the four were born in this country, and the fourth has been a citizen longer than Trump’s current wife.
“Go home” has been shouted at countless anti-racism protestors during recent weeks, despite the fact that these protestors often march in their own neighborhoods. Telling them to “go home” says that their presence is unwelcome, their voices should be silent, their lives don’t matter.
Trump recently said that the anti-racist Black Lives Matter movement is a “symbol of hate.” Then he claimed that memorials to treasonous racists represent the “history, heritage, and greatness of our country.” And when Trump was asked about his message to Black Americans, he replied, “If you don’t understand your history, you will go back to it again.” Rather than making America great again, “go home” for Trump seems to be a callback to the racist values of the Confederacy. A phrase as short as “Go home” (or “go back”) can carry an entire encyclopedia of bigotry.
But the longer I looked at the simple sculpture of wood, nails and paint, the more I realized that the word “home” outnumbered the phrase “go home” seven to one. My initial positive impression returned even stronger than before. “Go home” was soon drowned out by “home, home, home, home, home, home, and home,” over and over, rolling through my mind as the words climbed the rungs of the sign, growing in strength, rising to a crescendo.
A pandemic makes for a bad time to knock on doors, so I didn’t find out who made the sign. But I want to thank the artist for providing inspiration. As I biked the few miles back to the house that I call home, the concluding words of our national anthem echoed in my thoughts. This country is the “home of the brave,” not the home of cowards who reject anyone outside a narrow definition of what it means to be an American or a life that matters.
The cacophony of bigotry and oppression from Trump and his enablers is no match for the song of inclusion rising from protests around the country. For every narrow-minded shout of “Go home!” we have a seven-fold choir singing, “We are home!”
Our neighborhood is our home. Our state is our home. Our country is our home. Our world is our home. Home is a place for all who want to work together to form a more perfect union. With our voices, our marches, and our votes, in every direction across the land, let’s build the best home we can.
John Sheirer is an author and teacher who lives in Florence. His most recent book is the pandemic-themed novella, “Fever Cabin.” Find him at JohnSheirer.com.