One of the subjects I have studied is the movement of peoples involved in historical events.  Like lemmings, human populations from time to time shift from their historical homelands and move outward encountering neighbors who often give way, get out of the way and sometimes, move on themselves.  Each people has a story to tell of ancestors leaving a homeland to make themselves part of a new place often becoming the majority controlling other peoples, indigenous, but not very virile or responsive.  Witness the movement of Semitic peoples into what became Israel today.  This happened four thousand years ago and is recorded in the Torah (Old Testament).  The Greeks, under Philip and Alexander of Macedon, spread to Egypt and almost into India while covering the space in between creating an amalgam of societies that became known as Byzantine.

The Romans spread from a collection of seven hills in Italy to take over the Alexandrian creation and went beyond up into Europe and over the water to England.  The result of all of this movement of peoples and ideas was the creation of Western Civilization.  The notion of one God, Republican government, Democratic ideals and examples of beauty and idealization of art and science became centered in an English speaking and commercial centralization in the North American continent.

Today there is a serious movement of people surging towards the United States in North America.  It is a center of civilization with opportunities unlike any other time and place. Europe, now somewhat like the United States of Europe, is closer to the vast numbers of people to the south and east who want to move into their lands and over the water to their member states.  Here in the U.S. there is the movement of peoples in Central and South America and from impoverished islands in the Caribbean to “America” the home of storied opportunity.

What disturbs this picture of a country waiting to be filled with strangers from strange lands is the conflict between ideologies and religion.  Nowhere is the clash as noticeable as the Muslim impact on France and now the Netherlands. The culture of Islam is not just a tradition of subjugation of women and a “foreign” concept of a legal system called Shariah, but it is one of violence towards objections of the host nation to a “foreign” way of doing things.  This has not been a peaceful movement of peoples from the Third World to highly successful and “modern” countries. There is a clash of cultures and perceived mistreatment of females and significant differences in the meaning of religion. There are strangers from strange lands constantly on the move and their presence is here and everywhere.