Summary Of Staying Put Making A Home In A Homeless World By Scott Sanders

The common belief is that the grass is greener on the other side. In this excerpt from “Staying Put: Making A Home in A Restless World” Scott Sanders utilizes an philosophical tone to argue that it is not necessarily true. In his response to Salman Rushdie’s essay, Sanders argues that the better thing is to instead make a place home for a lifetime, and he uses an assortment of rhetorical devices to develop his claim.

Stagnation is intolerable, movement is manageable, is a common Western belief. In his essay, Sanders use irony in lines 3-8 to allow the reader to see how he views this conviction. ‘Our Promised Land has always been over the next ridge or at the end of the trail, never under our feet.’ Sanders follows the sentence by explaining that if Americans wear out the land, they still labor under the illusion that there is always more land to be gained. With the use of irony, Sanders presents his audience with a popular idea in an atypical approach.

Sander’s zeugma equated prospectors with rainbow-chasers, people searching for a

In lines 40-43 Sanders asks his audience if ‘migration has immunized the United States against bigotry?’ He does not provide an answer, moving on to ask another question. ‘And even if, by uprooting ourselves, we shed our chauvinism, is that all we lose?’ Here, Sanders demands his audience to think over what happens when we leave our home-land or even our home-town. Popular novels of 20th century era rusticated the idea of small towns and farms and praised the glamor of cities, but Sanders takes a different approach. In asking what is lost with movement, he does not allow his readers to dwell on any positive outlook on relocating. Instead, as they try to formulate an answer to his rhetorical question, he takes them on to his answer, that the worst abuses are carried out by immigrants, who ‘pack up their visions and values’