Migration

    I was reading about how the first humans developed in Africa and proceeded to travel to  Asia Minor, Asia, Europe.  Eventually populating the most remote of the Pacific islands and even the Arctic Circle.  I think Antartica was missed only because it isn't on the way to somewhere.
    I read about the travels of the Vidic Aryans and the rampages of the Golden Horde.  The Huns becoming Hungarians and some Romans becoming Romanians. Caesars becoming Tzars.  I thought about some Chinese becoming Japanese and Korean,  becoming the various tribes of the Asian South East. I wondered, along with everyone else, how the Abos got to Australia in a past so removed and dim no one remembers. The same is true of the Polynesians.  They don't know how they got there.  They found it so pleasant they didn't bother to remember?  Maybe.  Maybe when we (academics with a mania for such questions) asked, we dismissed the answers or garbled the intent. That happens often enough.
    That got me to thinking of Thor Hyerdahl and the Kon Tiki and the almost bizarre connection of Jacquline Beer and "77 Sunset Strip".  A pulled thread that begins in the Great Rift Valley and ends with  Edd (Kookie) Byrnes?  The spread and interconnectivity of people, ideas and concepts.  That brings up Salman Rushdie and "The Satanic Verses"  as a thorough examination of that cultural phenomenon and idea.
    Tribal migration as a continuous condition of the human experience. Endless comingling.  It's interesting that in the case of the Americas, the north was primarily resettled by the restless, northern European tribes and the south by the tribes of the Iberian peninsula. Settlement determined by the Atlantic Trade Winds  The fascinating introduction of dominant language and ethnic groups and pushing aside the discovered, established societies of an earlier wave of migration.
    I could go on and on. Believe me, if I had more whiskey, I would.  Rushdie pushed it to over 500 pages just examining a few aspects, mainly culture and religion but there is always that one underlying concept:  Migration. We can talk about the migration of concepts, ideas and values but ultimately people are the carriers of these conditions. We find that the underlying feature is endless movement. It's fundamental and as a result, migration is a fundamental human right.  As such, attempts to oppose that right are useless and doomed to ultimate failure. We've seen that failure over the last four years.

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