The Power of the Media
The power of the media upon the dispossessed and marginalized when someone dispossessed and marginalized like them cannot be discounted. The author recalls a moment when seeing an openly gay public figure on the cover of Time Magazine a revelatory:
The cover hit me like a freight truck. The headline—“Yep, I’m Gay”—could have been a lighthouse. The woman’s name was Ellen DeGeneres.
The Power of Media
The media has the power to change lives in small but significant ways by illuminating the marginalized as people of worth. Media has the power to change lives by giving people access to a means of expressing themselves to others in a way that allowing them to lay claim to their own importance:
After twenty-five years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom.
Coming Out
Vargas relates the moment he publicly came out as gay. It was in a high school class immediately after watching the Oscar-winning documentary about Harvey Milk. Metaphor helps reveal how it was transformative moment for the entire class, not just him alone:
Even though I felt how uncomfortable some people were, I remember feeling quite comfortable, as if I had opened a window and let some light into what was a very dark room—the room inside my head.
Journalistic Coverage of Immigration
Vargas takes journalists—especially broadcast news—to task for not covering immigration issues in the way it should. He engages a particularly creative and resonant metaphorical to situate the central problem he associates with lack of respectable journalistic reporting on issues related to immigration:
Context is the invisible ghost that haunts many TV segments, radio hits, and news articles. Most journalists and media influencers I’ve spoken to or have been interviewed by do not know basic information about immigration and how the system works —or doesn’t.
Jail Cell Epiphany
His undocumented status finally catches up with him at airport security check-in and Vargas finds himself locked up in a cell. Like so many other writers before, he has a moment of epiphany which he puts into a very sad, almost tragic, metaphor:
It occurred to me that I’d been in an intimate, long-term relationship all along. I was in a toxic, abusive, codependent relationship with America, and there was no getting out.
