Proving Who You Are

There are rumors that in order to get a passport for the first time, you will have to:  provide addresses of all the places you have lived since you were born; your lifetime employment history, including supervisors' names, addresses, and phone numbers; personal details about your brothers and sisters; your mother's addresses a year before your birth; and any religious ceremonies around your birth.

Of course, the first thing that came to my mind is that these proposed requirements are just another hoax.

Sorry, folks. Although I could not find the actual documents in the labyrinthine sources called the Federal Government, I did find enough information to ascertain that something is afoot.

And Obama thought that he had problems with the birthers!

I don't know about your personal history, but when I reflect on mine, the only thing I can conclude is that it is a good thing I already have a passport. Not like the 70% of US citizens who do not. Because I cannot provide the above information!

The house in which I was born in SW Minnesota no longer exists. I know, because we have looked for it. I have no idea what the address is of the second house in which I lived in another small town. My mother's address - same thing.

Employers and supervisors - good luck. Does that include the babysitting jobs that were my first employment as a teenager? Supervisors is an even murkier area, since as a teen I didn't even know what a supervisor was when I taught grade school kids how to swim. Then there was college and what today is called work study. And now in my life as a self-employed person. All those clients whom I saw? All the people who have bought my books and my photography?

Fortunately I would be spared the religious ceremonies question, since I am not male and Jewish - and my baptism took place months later. And checking out Jewish circumcism ceremonies has a whiff of Nazi Germany to it. To say nothing about Islamaphobic sentiment, so in vogue these days.

Clem's history is even more vague. He lived above a barbershop on the Iron Range (making him technically a Ranger, something only a Minnesota resident would get). Then there was the trailer he lived in that moved around the state following his father's itinerant employment.

And does residence count when we lived in a campground for a while, between moving from one state to another?

I always have thought, even before our global connectedness via the Internet, that all national boundaries should be abolished and people could live and travel where ever they wish. Just think what that would do to all the ethnic wars that are so popular these days.

There was the story of the little boy, whom everyone was frantically searching for, who declared when he was located, "I wasn't lost. I knew right where I was." Just like him, I know who I am, even if everyone else doesn't.

At least since I already have a passport, I still can  cross the Canadian border for a little recreation in the North Woods.