Prove You Are Real

You know you exist.  Everyone around you can see you exist.  But legally,existence how do you prove it?

Yesterday, while I was out running, I listened to a podcast about a young lady who was trying to establish a legal identity.  She had been born at home, delivered by a midwife.  No birth certificate was ever filed.  There was never a Social Security application.  She was home-schooled, so there were no school records.  She had been kept on a farm in the country for almost her entire life, so she had no paper trail at all.  No ID, no driver’s license, not so much as a library card.  Nothing.

In a case like this, what is your future?  You can’t go to school, you can’t get a job, you can’t prove you’re a citizen, and you certainly can’t fly anywhere.  Legally, you don’t exist, so you really have no future.

At the risk of spoiling the ending, there was a solution, but it involved an act by the state legislature.

This is rare, but not unheard of.  I’ve gotten the impression there are many people in this country who long for a simpler time, when there was much more personal freedom and life was not nearly so complicated.  This story proves that that simpler time is gone forever.

 

Listen to the podcast at Radiolab.org, The Girl Who Doesn’t Exist,  http://www.radiolab.org/story/invisible-girl/?utm_source=local&utm_medium=treatment&utm_campaign=daMost&utm_content=damostviewedThe photo came from that website.

Part of this young lady’s struggle was making a YouTube video.  You can view it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPtpKNyaO0U.

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