Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos), Woody Guthrie: [...] The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon, A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,

Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos), Woody Guthrie: [...] The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon, A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills, Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves? The radio says, "They are just deportees" Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards? Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit? To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil And be called by no name except "deportees"? This is some time after 1948. Then, just as now, there were people who saw non-citizens as barely humans, in the US and everywhere else. But then there was Woody Guthrie as well, and the many people like him who saw the human in the foreigner. What has changed in recent years is the reach of the mightiest power, and sheer number of people who find ourselves in the wrong end of its struggle for control.