The train ride home…

Here I sit on a train. I’ve done this trip so many times that it brings a feeling of serendipity. The ride always gives me time to read, time to observe, time to listen to music, time to sleep, time to write, and time to be grateful. This day I’m grateful for friends, for family, for work, for you reading this post.

I don’t know what the future holds, it seems that my life has been always plagued by uncertainty. Who knows, maybe in the coming years I’ll be forced to ride a train south, like they did to people like me in the fifties. Did it work? Did it help anyone to force people out of the country, did the abuse Mexican migrants suffered back then benefit someone? If it did, then I’m thankful for that, I’m tankful that the abuses suffered were not in vain. Was it worth it?

I take a short nap in between writing this post. We stopped somewhere in the middle of the night, as the train starts moving and the train’s horn sounds, I awaken. The sound of the horn reminds me of a lot of things. I remember my mother once said that the train’s horn seemed so lonely and sad, I remember this happened back in Mexico. Suddenly the sounds reminds me of a book I read, Night by Elie Wiesel. The book was mandatory reading for public schools, will public schools still exist in a not so distant future? It makes me wonder if enough people read the book.

A young white man boards the train at McCook, Nebraska; I wonder if he read it. I wonder if he would join an army and follow orders from an elected President turned despot, turned tyrant. I wonder if enough propaganda has entered him, to make him fear people like me. I wonder which of my targeted identities would have gotten me in a train packed like in the book. If I like Wiesel would live in that time, at that place, would I have been in that train and why?

The young man was not sure what to do as he sat in the seat next to me. He had to look at the way I placed my tag above my seat and he copied my action. This is his first time on a train. I wonder where he is going? Is he like me headed home to family for thanksgiving. Had he been alive at that time and at that place, and had I been alive at that time and in that place would we find ourselves in different sides of the story and would we find humanity in one another?

How disconnected can one person get from another, to forget that we are the same? In Lak’ech Ala K’in.