Kangaroos can only hop forward

I haven't been a citizen of the place I was living in for as long as I can remember. I was born in Canberra, but when I was four my dad took a job with the World Bank and my family moved to Washington, D.C. So I was living in the U.S. on a "dependant visa." During my childhood we were posted to Indonesia for three years and to Russia for one year, on corresponding visas. I usually didn't have to think about it, except that I wasn't allowed to work (so all that baby-sitting I did in high school was illegal.)

Then from Russia I applied to some universities in the States and got into Yale. So I was living in New Haven for four years on a "student visa." This was the first time in my life that I was forced to understand immigration law, and it was a rude awakening. I grew up in the States, was spoiled by my parents, never had to handle my own papers, and it wasn't an emotional reality that I didn't have an automatic right to be in the country. I had a lackadaisical attitude towards my visa and the attendant bits of paper. For example, the F1 visa in your passport is not enough, you also need to carry with you the I20 form signed by your dean. This was the subject of one teary scene at the airport as I attempted to return to the States after Christmas break during my freshman year. I hadn't known I needed to bring the I20 with me, indeed it was lost somewhere in the mouldering piles of crap in my dorm room. Luckily I had a few textbooks in my luggage as "proof" of my student status, and the immigration authorities must have taken pity on the hysterical, pimply 16-year old with her messy bags. (This never would have happened post 9-11.)

I had many more teary scenes to come, from not realizing that when I renewed my passport I needed to renew my student visa, to not applying for my "practical training" work visa five months ahead of time so that I could legally work a summer job (this entailed a pilgrimage to a non-public INS office in New Jersey, sneaking past the front desk and knocking on the office door of a director to beg him to help me; I must have been good at inspiring pity because he issued me a visa on the spot which technically you're supposed to wait for an INS office in Vermont to take 3-5 months to process.)

Then after graduation there was the transition to an H1-B "technical workers" visa as I went to a strategy consulting firm in Tyson's Corner, near D.C. I spent almost five years working in D.C. and the frequency of teary airport scenes declined as I began to get my shit together, although certainly not to zero.

The point of all this boring exposition is that I grew up as the ultimate ex-pat; a rootless, internationalist cosmopolitan who saw nationalism and even patriotism as cheesy, tacky offshoots of the xenophobia bequeathed to the human brain by millenia of evolution. Yet instinct does not define humanity. Just as human beings toilet train ourselves, we should train ourselves out of the reflexive need to define an "in-group" and an "out-group." That was my philosophy, with an emotional fervor given flavour by hundreds of hours of fermentation in the "Non-citizens" waiting line in the L.A. International airport. I love how teenagers think up idealistic justifications for all their motivations. Like, I was supposedly against the concept of a nation-state because of universal human rights, but secretly it was just so inconvenient keeping all my documents in order.

I had a keen interest in politics, as is legally required for all Washington, D.C. residents, but no sense of ownership in that interest. It was never, "How could we do this?" but "How could they do this?" This is a bit of a tangent, but I was recently listening to this podcast of a class on Existentialism where the professor was discussing the chapter in The Brothers Karamazov where Ivan discusses God with Alyosha, using the suffering of innocent children as the crux of his argument condemning existence. The prof said that you can't attack Ivan's arguments with logic, the problem is the context of those arguments; Ivan supposes himself to be an independent, detached observer whereas he is actually a participant in existence and complicit in the sin and suffering in the world. I thought it was a fantastic point and I personally hope to wean myself away from whiny Ivan-like detachment towards a helpful Alyosha-like participation in life.

Two years ago I met Martin and fell head over heels in love, although that is a story for another day. Ever since then "citizenship" has been quite a theme in our lives, as we applied for a spouse visa for him to move to Australia with me, moved here, got back in touch with my family, and I took a temporary contract working for the Australian Department of Immigration. Meanwhile, my dad, who lives in Moscow, has been applying for Australian citizenship for his Russian wife, Olga. (Inviting Slavs into the country runs in the family.) Dad and Olga have been married for almost ten years, but it's more complicated because they are not living in Australia and have to provide evidence of a "strong connection to Australia and intention to return." To get Australian citizenship Olga will have to pass a civics exam testing her knowledge of English and Australian history and culture. I picked up the workbook for her yesterday: "Let's participate: A Course in Australian Citizenship (2nd ed.)"

"Listen to the tape and repeat these key words and phrases. Check their meaning in your dictionary:
CITIZEN
PERMANENT RESIDENT
BIRTH
DESCENT
NATION
COMMUNITY
INDIGENOUS"

The workbook is cheesy, peppy, upbeat, simplistic, faintly jingoistic, and all the other things I reflexively hate. It's also focussed on people learning English, so I'm sure that Olga, who has worked for the UN and the IMF and is fluent in English, will find it appropriately demeaning to work through. My favorite part is a mock email comprehension exercise which reads in part:

"...Australia's a young country - going forward. Like a kangaroo - it can only go in one direction - forwards. Ever seen a kangaroo hopping backwards? :-)..."
"Question B: Why does Simon think Australia is like a kangaroo?"

So this is my new favorite cliche: "Kangaroos can only hop forward." It's a great cliche for several reasons:
1) it's technically wrong (I've seen kangaroos go backwards.)
2) it encompasses all kinds of cultural assumptions about the nature and value of progress
3) you can unpack it indefinitely to provide all kinds of musings about the nature of the space-time continuum (see: "You can't cross the same river twice.")