Greetings from the Santiago Airport! (written on July 22)

Today I’m thinking about airports. For one, I’m sitting in one (on my way to spend a few days in Buenos Aires with my parents!) and I’m looking out a huge glass window, watching droves of people with rolling bags briskly walk by as they travel to places near and far. Sitting here, I realize that I LOVE airports. For me, they represent the anticipation of unknown places, untapped knowledge, and the rush of adventure in planning a journey.

For me, travel and movement has always been a choice, almost always been a joy, and always been “my right.”

As I sit here basking in my love for airports, I think of friends of mine who have had an altogether different experience with airports: a painful experience where deep, deep discrimination is awakened and ripped open. I think of friends of mine whose last experience in an airport was against their will. Handcuffed and shoved onto a plane, many people know U.S. airports because they, unlike me, have been told that they are NOT allowed to enter some countries.

Are they criminals? Are they somehow “lesser beings” that don’t deserve the basic right to movement? Why do I deserve it and not them? Why was I able to zip back and forth in and out of Mexico for two years while a Harvard classmate, someone who has lived in the United States since he can remember, is threatened to be shipped back to a country that has never been his home?

Ripped from their homes, they are flown back to Mexico or wherever “they come from.” They, unlike me, can’t think of travel as an exciting adventure.

So yes, for me, a citizen of the United States, a woman with privileges that would be unfathomable to many, airports are fun and exciting…. And airports are also a reminder that my blue U.S. passport gives me basic human rights that my very country actively works to deny in others.