Lurking in back of seasonal revelry, like a cat cowering behind a Christmas tree, waits the ghost of tomorrow. Shortly a new year will be upon us, and we each will embark, like pilgrims, into the unknown. What drives us on, what demons or angels, what winds of adversity or breezes of contentment will we face? Just like human migrants throughout history, and their corollaries in the animal world ranging from Mexico-bound hummingbirds to the seasonal rearrangements of Arctic Caribou, we might pause over the holidays to assess the whys and hows of our forthcoming movement through time and space. What do we want in the year to come and what winds will impel us to become our future selves?
At the broadest level, life’s motion towards goals falls into two categories: there’s pull factors, when an outcome is so desired that it veritably hauls us towards its general direction. And then there’s push factors, where deadlines and socio-economic vagaries thrust us into a camp of life changes. Sometimes, though not for we cushy student types, literal life danger forces us out of our comfort zone. These latter forces, push factors, can be truly existential in the nature of hunger and violence.
Leaving destitution in search of the gift of a better life occasionally leads great masses of humans to travel across the planet. Famously, in America, Ellis Island in New York received waves of trans-Atlantic migrants in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. And in Canada repeated influxes of new settlers have populated the land that, a Spanish-speaker once agreed, could have gotten its cartographic name from “Nada” – here is nothing… a cruel testament of views toward Indigenous Peoples.
Canonized in history books and touchstone family films like An American Story, characters like that film’s young mouse Fievel for decades personalized the imagined spirit of neophyte citizens of the American culture. Fievel wasn’t any mouse, though—he was an explicitly Jewish mouse, as his parents illustrate at the outset. “To you every night is Hannukah!” scolds his mother to his father. This spirit of eternal blessing is crucial to the sense of moving towards something better, rather than flight from something untenable—a fact our peers sometimes miss when they jump fancifully into a new year without their common sense in tow. And the fact that culture matters, our background and what we believe in and what we celebrate as a life worth living, well, that is the difference between a true nation and a mere double entry accounting patchwork of payroll recipients.
You see, Fievel was not only new to the nation and thus a metonymy for the latter-day American colonizer experience—he had also lost his family and, with the help of the American ideology of fearlessly pursuing one’s destiny, the film is about his aim to re-achieve unity with this family and with a meaningful life. As we know too well that when we or our fellow Canadians are alone on the Holidays few things feel more empty and joyless.
So here are a few of summary snippets from Fievel the rodent hero:
Henri: I know, my little immigrant. You want to find your family. And you will.
Fievel: But how? They’re so far away, and it’s so big. I’ll never find them anyway.
Henri: J’me excuse pardonnez, but did you say never? So young, and you’ve already lost hope! This is America, the place to find hope. If you give up now, you will never find your family. So never say never.”
This presumably teaches youth in the audience that anything is possible with hard work and diligence – in our elementary school gymnasium as we all sat on the floor that’s the impression we received, anyway. That, and a sore backside.
“Papa: In America, there are mouse holes in every wall.
Mama: Who says?
Papa, Tanya, and Fievel: Everyone!
Papa: In America, there are bread crumbs on every floor.
Mama: You’re talking nonsense!
Papa: In America, you can say anything you want, but most important – and this I know for a fact – in America, there are no cats.”
Besides the Depression-era Roosevelt promise of a chicken in every pot, this quote illustrates the idealistic belief that, unlike in despotic regimes the world over, in America individual freedom from tyranny is as real as the life of a mouse living free from fear of cats. And, as the film shortly shows, equally as unrealistic.
Being a fairy tale fantasy sort of film from almost a half century ago, it’s hard to imagine that people today would believe the metaphoric line that there are no proverbial cats in America. Yet, as surely as that the glow of the Holidays leads to the hum-drum reality of a New Year – replete with unrealistic expectations dashed upon the rocks of stolid life circumstances, in the present epoch millions upon millions of migrants continue to pursue their dreams by moving to North America.
In fact, according to the ultra-progressive New York Times, “total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed eight million people. That’s a faster pace of arrivals than during any other period on record, including the peak years of Ellis Island traffic, when millions of Europeans came to the United States. Even after taking into account today’s larger U.S. population, the recent surge is the most rapid since at least 1850.”
In other words, there have never been more Fievels with a family entering American shores (or deserts). Which implies that there have never been more push factors of poverty and pull factors of hopes—for a job in a chicken slaughterhouse, for instance, doing work (like the animals Fievel encounters, who perform a series of ignominious vocations) that citizens eschew.
Nevertheless, what the rubber soul of migrant reality in a historical context reveals is that some historical migrations are more dire than others. While interviewers at the US southern border reveal horrifying sights—like the two-years-old being escorted by teenagers with no parents in sight, who when asked her age held up two fingers and proudly said “dos!”, and new arrivals whose only English speech are the key two words “life danger”, there is one fairly recent historical outpouring of humanity that stands alone in terms of stark desperation. I’m speaking here of the Holocaust-era exodus of Jews from Western Europe – in the wake of the ultimate bad cat, the Fuhrer of Germany. It’s one of many pogroms and atrocities against the Jewish people through history, and it most clearly shows push factors at work. Forced to leave home with bleak prospects, these migrants had it as rough or rougher than any in history.
One such figure was the Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin – with fellow travellers he sought to escape into erstwhile-neutral (but still fascist, under General Franco) Spain. Over the Pyrenees Mountain range, no less. Benjamin’s life’s work was far ahead of his time; he had penned crucial treatises about the effect of mechanical reproduction on art and had wondered about the nature of the human spirit in an age of increased automation, alienation, and mindless productivity. His writings, worthy of the many in-depth studies they’ve spawned in later generations, centre upon the core Marxist dictum: how best can humanity’s species-being, our core creative essence that leads us to be a monkey above the troupe, a creature capable both of reasoning intricately and feeling deeply, find fulfillment in an age where technology proceeds like a dynamo alongside misery growing by the day?
Settling accounts with history, and for us that includes our personal history of joys and failures that have brought us to the precipice of another year, perhaps requires less to-do lists and new year’s resolutions, less well-meaning therapy sessions or TikTok how-to videos, and instead a truly poetic turn. Benjamin implied as such when he wrote:
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Benjamin here asks us to see the truth in our times and to face the future honestly.
So in a sense, push and pull factors combine within life as it is lived. Just as many of the migrants crossing into America own cell phones and paid tens of thousands of dollars to cartels for their passage, implying relative affluence (if not akin to Fievel riding steerage across the Atlantic) it is not merely in pursuit of meals and a job that they migrate – something more ephemeral and thematic and powerful is going on. It’s motion based on hope, a fact tragically diminished in other tragic historical instances of human relocation, such as escaping from the NAZIs.
For Benjamin, his passage from death was not about a mystic faraway land where all dreams come true. His transit was about survival, plain and simple. But he did not survive. About to pass through a NAZI road block he ingested poison rather than be captured alive. His is a stony reminder that our lives and success are not promised to us. We have to work for them and we have to choose as best we can when faced with difficult options. The holidays are just that, a holiday from life’s events impending as surely as the turning of the earth and the shifting of the tides.
But by parsing out the forms of fear and hope that lead other people to migrate in far direr times and places, hopefully we can shine some light on our own journey into a new year. If we are honest about the blessings and possibilities, as well as the challenges and dangers within our lives, we can march forward confidently into the undiscovered country of the future.
Season’s Greetings and Happy New Year to All, May 2025 Bring You Abundant Success!
References
Benjamin, W. (1892-1940). Quote retrieved from
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1860.Walter_Benjamin
Freudberg, J. & Geiss, T. (1986). An American Tale. Stephen Spielberg Presents a Don Bluth Film. Quotes retrieved from https://www.ranker.com/list/the-best-american-tail-an-quotes/movie-and-tv-quotes
Leonhardt, D. & Sun, A. (December 2024). ‘Recent Immigration Surge Has Been Largest in American History’. NY Times Reprinted on MSN.com. Retrieved from https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/recent-immigration-surge-has-been-largest-in-u-s-history/ar-AA1vF7Za
Schroeder, J. (2024). ‘Indiana Attorney General Asks Tyson Foods to answer questions about migrants working in Logansport’. FOX59 TV. Retrieved from https://fox59.com/indiana-news/indiana-ag-asks-tyson-foods-to-answer-questions-about-migrants-working-in-logansport/
Sheffield, T. (2024). ‘2 Year Old Migrant Girl Arrives at US Border Looking For Her Parents, Authorities Say’. People Magazine. Retrieved from https://people.com/2-year-old-migrant-girl-arrives-at-us-border-looking-for-her-parents-authorities-say-8751691
UN News. (2022). ‘More Than 50 000 Migrants ‘Die in Search of a Better Life’’. United Nations. Retrieved from https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/11/1130997