Home

One of my all time favorite scenes is coming home in the evening and pulling into my driveway -- and seeing my home lit up. I love the orange-warm glow and the sight of my husband working at the dining room table. For the first several months after we bought this house, I would stretch out on the floor and just try to absorb that it was mine.

My house is the only inanimate object to which I've ever had an emotional attachment. I don't like people I don't know touching my house. I believe in home.

Home is a loaded word. It is a basic need and urge of all humans - the find, create home. I believe that home is not just a physical place, but a spot in our hearts too. How else could we be so comfortable with particular people? Or places? Anyone who has been truly in love knows that you can be home with a person.

Today, I heard a piece on NPR about children in Uganda who must commute each night to the cities to sleep because they are not safe from being kidnapped by rogue warriors and forced into slavery - sexual and otherwise. This played on a theme I've been thinking about for a while now. Home. And how so many of us don't have home. Or how one of the truly tragic outcomes of violence is that we are robbed of Home.

Earlier this summer, I toured the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC - again. Each time I see it, I come to understand a deeper meaning of just what was destroyed by the nazis. Following my tour, I read the great book, NIGHT. I couldn't help but compare the terror rape creates in the lives of the victims to the terrors created by the holocaust - although, not on the same scale. But, when we add in all the people on the planet who are terrorized in their homes - or robbed of a sense of home by fear inflicted by others, there is something of a modern holocaust going on.

I resent that fear is used so casually to gain power over others. It makes me angry that even our leaders will play on our fears in order to accomplish their agendas. I am infuriated when people rob others of a safe haven because of greed or meanness or stupidity, etc.

The sense of security and safety and comfort that is embodied in Home is a right of all people. The penalties for denying it ought to be severe.

Click on the title for a link to the bit on NPR.