داستان انگلیسی بحران هویت

IDENTITY CRISIS

Except for middle aged-men and women going through a mid-life crisis, we rarely question our identity. Your name is your name, your family is your family, and your country is your country. But what if you woke up one day and your name was no longer your name, your family was not who you thought they were, and your country turned its back on you? That’s exactly what happened to Tim and Alex Foley, two brothers who had their lives turned upside down one day in 2010.

On the surface, it was a normal day for a normal American family. Alex was a high school student who had recently returned home from studying abroad in Singapore. Tim had just finished his third year of college, studying international relations at George Washington University. The students were on summer break from school, and it was Tim’s 20th birthday. The family went out for a buffet lunch at an Indian restaurant for Tim’s birthday and returned home to celebrate with some champagne. Tim was planning to go out with friends later that night, so he went up to his bedroom to make plans. Then he heard a knock on the door followed by screams of “FBI.” The FBI agents streamed into his house from the back door and the front.

At first, Tim thought that the police were coming for him because they had found out about all the alcohol at a house party he went to the night before. The legal drinking age in the U.S. is 21, and Tim was underage. He soon learned that they were there for something much more serious. One of the FBI agents told them that their parents were agents of a foreign government. Both their mother and father were arrested, handcuffed and driven away in separate cars.

Alex and Tim were left wondering what happened. They were sure that it was a mistake. Their father worked for an international relations think tank and their mother was a real estate agent. The family had recently taken U.S. citizenship, but they were originally Canadians. They were just a normal suburban family, or so they thought.

Within days, their parents, along with eight others, had admitted to being Russian spies and were exchanged for four imprisoned Russians who spied for America. In an age where the CIA has been caught spying on many of its allies, many people don’t bat an eyelash when they hear that other countries spy on the U.S. But the story of Alex and Tim’s parents was truly an extraordinary case.

Alex and Tim’s parents weren’t posing as Russian immigrants. They were posing as Canadians, and they had been undercover for decades. Their names, Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley, were taken from actual Canadians who had died as children. After intensive language and culture training, the young couple in their twenties were placed in Toronto.

Donald started a diaper delivery business and got another undergraduate degree, even though he already had one from a Russian university. Tracey raised their Canadian-born children. Next, the young family of four moved to France, where Donald got an MBA. By this time they had a decades long cover story from Canada to France. Donald then uprooted his wife and two Canadian children from France to the US, in 1999.

Donald continued collecting post-graduate degrees, this time going to Harvard University. Tracey raised the children, and no one was the wiser. Not even Tim and Alex.

When everything came to a head, Tim and Alex were lost. Overnight, their parents had changed from Donald and Tracey to Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova. Tim and Alex were given new names as well. They were Timofei and Alexander Vavilov. Suddenly they found themselves living in Russia, not speaking the language, and trying to understand who they were and who their parents were. “I feel like I have been stripped of my own identity for something I had nothing to do with,” Alex said.

Both Tim and Alex were stripped of their Canadian citizenship. And now they are suing the Canadian government to at least get that part of their identity back.

“I lived for 20 years believing that I was Canadian and I still believe I am Canadian, nothing can change that,” Tim wrote in a statement to the Canadian court. “I do not have any attachment to Russia, I do not speak the language, I do not know many friends there, I have not lived there for any extended periods of time, and I do not want to live there.”

While Alex and Tim’s identity crisis was a matter of family and country, 200 years earlier the Luddites experienced a different sort of identity crisis. Their identities were wrapped up in their jobs. Today we use the expression ‘Luddite’ to describe someone who opposes new technology, but the Luddites were real people. They were followers of General Ned Ludd in 18th century England. They were hell-bent on destroying machinery and they weren’t afraid to put it all on the line. Luddites were imprisoned, shot, killed, and hanged in their war against the machines.

On a Saturday night, some big guys were drinking beer at the local bar, but it wasn’t an average night on the town. They were armed with rifles and sledgehammers. These were Luddites and they were preparing for battle. They left the bar and picked up more guys on the way to the factory. It was a dark moonless night. By the time they arrived at the factory, there were 150 of them all ready to destroy the machines.

The Luddites weren’t against all machines. They were against the kinds of machines that were taking away their livelihood. The Luddites were highly paid skilled workers that were being replaced by new machinery. This was the early 1800s, and cloth manufacturing was big business. The expensive cloth England produced was sold all over the world and also provided lots of people with jobs.

There were women who spun the raw wool into yarn. There were men who would weave the yarn into cloth. And there were other people called croppers who used giant 50-pound scissors to cut the fabric. All of these jobs were highly paid, and the factory owners like business owners everywhere wanted to cut costs. Soon there were machines that could do the spinning and the weaving and the cutting. And they could do it faster, cheaper, and better.

Today we accept new technology as being inevitable, but the Luddites decided they weren’t going to take it lying down. Soon letters from a mysterious General Ludd started to be posted around town and sent to factory owners. The letters demanded that the factories get rid of the new machines. And if the factory owners refused, General Ludd would send his soldiers to destroy it and burn the factories down.

These weren’t empty threats. Mobs of men were showing up in the dead of night at factories and destroying machinery all over England. In a short time, there were dozens of attacks around the country. People were starting to panic about this underground army, so the government stepped in. A new law was passed that made destroying machines punishable by death. The army sent out thousands of soldiers to look for the Luddites, and the factory owners got armed guards to protect themselves.

Back to that fateful Saturday night in 1811, a showdown was inevitable. The factory owner and his guards were ready and waiting for the mob of Luddites. The 150-man Luddite army attacked the factory. They broke the windows and tried to break through the door, but they couldn’t get through. The guards fired at the Luddites, and the Luddites fired back. The Luddites eventually retreated, but not before 2 of them were killed in front of the factory, and a handful of others were arrested.

A trial was held, and many of them were found guilty and sentenced to death. These executions were the end of the Luddites. The factory owners won, the government won, technology won, and the workers lost. By 1850, the number of weavers in England had decreased from 250,000 to zero. Ned Ludd, on the other hand, was never caught. Many people think he never actually existed and was just a clever way to terrorize the factory owners.

In hindsight, the Luddites’ battle against technology was a lost cause, but some would say that attacking their jobs was an attack on their identities and their very existence.