Maybe I’ve read too many John Le Carre’s novels, but what struck me about the recent spy saga was not the existence of sleeper agents but the human aspects of the outcome. Here are 10 people who’ve lived in the U.S. for a number of years, who had established lives, and who are now going to different Russia than the one they had left, to a set of experiences with a modicum of unknown. Most of all their children who are actually U.S. citizens will in almost all cases be going to a foreign country. Maybe they speak the language, maybe they don’t. Regardless, their lives are completely upturned and undergoing the private equivalent of a revolution.
Earlier in the day I’d read an article chronicling the personal narratives of several illegal immigrants. Most had arrived in the U.S. illegally with their parents as children and were now also in predicaments not of their own making.
Maybe we can’t change much about the unexpected difficulties or hardships of all these young people, but we can give them our compassion, we can stretch our understanding to include those who are innocently caught in the consequences of the actions of others.
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