« Done | Main | Kaleidoscope »

May 21, 2006

Seen... and not believed

I would not have believed people believe such things, would not have believed people would write such things, and certainly not that they would put them in the public realm with names attached; would not , except that I read them in the local paper as letters to the editor. To wit:

  • This is the first time in the history of our great country that a group of people have tried to shape it into what they would like it to be, instead of what it has always been
  • Learn our language, which is English.
  • Don't you dare try to shape this great country to suit your needs or wants...we like America the way it's always been--for Americans
  • We reward the lazy bums who should not even be here to start with, for doing nothing more than packing up and leaving their country
  • Anyone who goes through the program and becomes an American can have all of our help. If not, they should be sent home

    I cannot even find the words to express my dismay at these sentiments. Not only are some of them just patently false (we do not have a national langugage, just in case you didn't already know that), some are both amazingly stupid and false. The first and third, for example. The folks who did live here for centuries before the Europeans arrived would certainly understand that all the people who came here changed this country to be what they wanted it to be, to the extent of herding up the peoples of the land and either killing them outright or limiting them to sterile environments that destroyed them all the more slowly. As for the fourth entry, I don't consider anyone lazy who risks their lives to get here when the "proper channels" deny them entry. The last one is just mean-spirited and selfish.

    America has always been a place where people from other countries have run away to. It has always been changing and changed by those people. It was designed to be changed. That's what all those founding documents were designed to allow. And the fact that I have to share my citizenship with self-righteous, ignorant and arrogant morons who write the kind of trash quoted above makes me very sad, and a little bit sick. No one has ever said such things in my presence. I wish that meant no one actually thought such things.

    On May 2, statistics assembled by the Pew Hispanic Center appeared in the same paper as these comments. They indicate that 90% of illegal immigrant men are part of the labor force. That hardly seems like a collection of "lazy bums" to me. Only 5% of the U.S. labor force is illegal aliens. 5%. That's it. To listen to these misguided folks, you'd think it was more like 70%.

    I don't understand the concept of "illegal" immigrants in these globally modern times. But I'll bet the elders of the local Haudenosaunee tribe could explain it to me. And INS wouldn't be in the answer.


    Note: excepts are taken from letters published in The Post-Standard on May 4, 2006, in response to the May 1 demonstrations by immigrants around the country.

    Update:: Heard in a meeting earlier this week that somebody managed to tack on a little rider to an immigration bill passed last week by the U.S. Senate that creates English as the official language of these United States. Ugh. We just won't learn, will we? (By the way, any specific on said bill, like name, title, or date of passage would be most appreciated and save me search time...)

    Posted by cageyer at May 21, 2006 11:22 PM

    Comments