Where are we from????

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I have noticed a lot of people (including myself) scrambling to make some family connection to Ukraine, as if that gives greater credibility than, say, being a real Mensch. For refugees (which my now is most of the world’s peoples) this is again a bit like the scramble by others to determine how much “Indigenous” DNA they carry (and was this before they/we crossed the land bridge from Asia, or later?) Again, as if credibility derives from DNA rather than from being a Mensch, a sapiens. I make no claims based on the suffering inflicted upon, or by, my ancestors. Of course, I say this from a place of white male privilege. I get this. But in the long history of humanity, we all have blood on our hands, we have all been indigenous somewhere, have all been perpetrators and settlers. The question is, how can we acknowledge that, and, humbled by who we are, find a way forward, transcending our history, to become something more? All classifications (cultural, Linnean, species, linguistic) are useful tools, and none are what is fully real, the full complexity of life. I am more interested in where we are going, than where we came from (it’s a privileged bias, I know). More than 40 years ago, before all the current catastrophes, I wrote about people I grew up with, embodied in one person:

Eric Reimer, from

In 1913, when Eric Reimer
was a child in the Ukraine,
his family was from East Prussia.
In 1920, as a young boy in Winnipeg,
he was from the Ukraine,
though the family name,
his father explained,
could be traced back to Germany.
About 1939, it was discovered
that the family lineage
actually went back to Holland,
and that the German period was short,
in not nonexistent.
In the early 1940s, intensive perusal
of family documents
suggested the possibility of some Russian blood,
but by 1946 this was clearly demonstrated
to be mere wild conjecture.
During a brief period
while crossing the border
on the way to go shopping in Minneapolis
Eric Reimer was born east of Ottawa.
He later admitted this to be inaccurate,
however; his mother delivered him
somewhere in West Germany
while escaping from the Russians.
In 1965, Eric retired to Abbotsford, B.C.,
where he was from Winnipeg, Manitoba.
He died just two years later
in the West Oaks Shopping Mall,
where he was said to be
from the Clearbrook Mennonite Church.
After a moment of being
neither here nor there
Eric Reimer appeared in heaven.
There he met God, from Everlasting,
who looked up from the book He was reading
and said, Well then, Eric Reimer,
where are you going?