Citizen of the World
Home on the Range
By Elizabeth Horner 

It took me years to appreciate the irony. When I was younger and going on long car trips with my mom, it was not uncommon for me to take out a battered-and-bruised Little House book and read it out-loud to her. I would imagine that the sun streaming through the windows did not belong to this century or to that particular stretch of blacktop; instead, it was the mid to late 1800s, and the light was baking the head of Laura Ingalls (eventually Wilder) as she travelled cross country in a covered wagon with her family. I consumed months of her life in the space of a few hours. Even more remarkable was the distance we traversed during that time.  When I closed the book on the last page, my mom and I had probably done the equivalent of a several days’ long journey for Laura. 

These books were a testament to the spirit of American pioneering.  The cause of manifest destiny had stretched the country from one ocean to the other, and people were eager to spread out into every part of it in search of freedom and prosperity. But migrating was a life-changing decision. Many people, including the Ingalls, knew that once they picked up and left a place, they would not come back again. Family connections teetered; even though one could write letters back and forth, a post office was not the first thing to be established in an undeveloped prairie. Stranded by a sea of grass, your entire world might consist of your farm and shanty, a few stores and neighbors several miles from you. 

How much things can change in a little over a century! Every morning, I wake up in my flat in London where I am doing study abroad, check my e-mail and Facebook accounts… maybe even ring up somebody from home. And when my studies here end in less than a month, it will not be more than a few hours’ disturbance before my plane lands in Ohio. I can chase the sun around the globe if I wanted to--- and it makes me realize that the days of American pioneering are well and truly over. 

The thought fills me with nostalgia for a life I have never known, but more than that, it makes me hopeful--- because life is no longer isolated. No one is forced into a position where they have to move away from outside cultures in order to better explore one’s own. No one travelling abroad has to give up their connections with their heritage. The advantages of modern day transportation and communication have created a culture where the movements and reactions of a person on one side of the planet cause vibrations across the entire World Wide Web. If a citizen is a person who owes allegiance to and in turn contributes to a certain state, then the borders of citizenship do not begin and end at the frontier line. I might not be able to feel the 19th century sun on my face, but I can look out a window in another country when someone holds a Skype camera up to it. I can breathe in theLondon air and then breathe it back out again as a sign of exasperation of my family. 

Laura Ingalls probably thought she was discovering a new world as her family’s horses trotted over mostly undisturbed land; she probably felt like it was some grand adventure. But, at least for me, I am just as thrilled with the discovery of the old one, with the chance to have my country, travel from my country, and keep it too.