I took my niece Josie to visit Ellis Island yesterday. In the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, as many as 5,000 immigrants a day from every corner of the world passed through the Great Hall at Ellis, on their way into the United States. Many endured weeks-long passages traveling with the approximate dignity of cattle. Not all made it in. You could be turned away — literally, put back on a ship — for dozens of reasons, including anything from being pregnant to suspicion of mental illness. The ones who crossed the harbor and joined the mass of American humanity built and became our modern nation.
Unless you’re one of the few remaining pure-blooded descendants of the Native Americans (some of whom prefer to be called American Indian), you’re an immigrant or the descendant of one. The anti-immigration, anti-alien mania that is gripping some segments of our society denies the basic fact that humanity is transient, and that one of the few actual virtues of the United States is that we are a melting pot society. Yes, it’s easy for me to say that being a New Yorker (where I’ve often walked up to people on the street needing directions and said, “Do you speak English?”), but they’ve even heard of reggae in Alabama.
Humanity is one family, and apparent differences are often exploited to the benefit of the few, at the expense of many. My family is from Sicily and then as now, my ancestors took the jobs that nobody else wanted, scrubbing floors, working in sweatshops and saving their pennies to buy homes. Later generations served and gave their lives in wars, taught in schools, moved our mail and served society many ways. I suggest that before anyone criticizes people who would take refuge in the United States, they know their own family history, thank their grandparents for their foresight and be grateful for the relative peace and calm that we enjoy here today.
Here is the link to those innocent faces: http://www.rawa.org/s-photos.htm
Eric,
Thank you for paying tribute to the hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis (so many!) who have paid the ultimate price so that our empire can have walking-around money. Perhaps someday we will have a president who will trace her heritage back to her Afghan father and Iraqi mother and pay tribute to them by dedicating a mosque on the grounds of the White House.
“So who no longer deserves your fealty? How scary will it be to leave?”
With the Clinton marriage still constantly forced down my throat (political) and a new court date for nonsense rescheduled for the near future (personal) I have become very clear on the formula; we bow to honor the system for without it we are lost. If the DA does not “continue” the case (that could easily have been dismissed last week), where might his/her job be next month?
If the media does not make us sick with continued reports of Chelsea’s dress and cake, what will keep people tuned in?
This time round we have not been so much tossed by storms as made dizzy by the constant revolutions.
Getting off; one step at a time; we learn to walk differently.
The book is Strangers to Ourselves by Julia Kristeva. I have only skimmed through it. It is somewhat academic. I’m not specifically recommending it, just mentioning…as it came to mind… good post, great comments…
Ellis Island is an amazing place. Not that any of my ancestors came through it, but I married into a family who did. One of the many great things about being of Native American descent is that I have a built in rebuttal to people making silly anti-immigration arguments. I always tell them that I agree, and as a part Cherokee, I personally want them out of Georgia. Now.
A great deal of the anti-immigration sentiment comes from people who moved to the Southwest and seem to fail to understand that Hispanic culture was here long before Anglos, and it is part of what makes it such a great place. They perceive it, particularly the retirees, as an alien and therefore threatening culture.
This sentiment waxes and wanes throughout American history, and will probably do so for quite a long time. This moment shall pass. In the meantime, the Tea Partiers (I notice someone finally clued them in that Tea Baggers was probably not the name they wanted) are fooling themselves. They have all the impulses of Tories, and are closer to Benedict Arnold than George Washington. They think they can stop all this change if they just try hard enough.
The founders of the US, veterans of the problems of mixing religion and state in Europe, understood quite clearly that when the state involves itself in religion, it harms both. I don’t think we quite appreciate today the depth of emotional attachment and generational fealty to the king that was felt by people at that time. It took enormous courage to break that and create a new path and a new way of living. And I think that current astrology is very much about that same idea of breaking those draining ancestral commitments that no longer serve the purpose of what we want to do in this life. People are flailing precisely because the old structures are crumbling, and they are now faced with the idea of making one that will work better for them, and this takes courage and commitment.
So who no longer deserves your fealty? How scary will it be to leave?
Yesterday I was checking the Common Dreams site and found a link to pictures of some of the many civilians we have murdered. I thought to myself that everyone in America needs to take a good long look at those pictures.
Let’s pause and remember the 400,000 Afghans and Iraqis — the Other — nearly all of them Muslim, that “our” nation has murdered in honor of our “conservative” ideology, and how this has been justified on the grounds that they are bad people. This has in turn driven our economy into self-consumption mode — a trillion dollars in debt, to prosecute wars with no actual benefit and no end in sight — and this, in turn, represents our suicidal, self-consumptive mentality.
When a mosque is erected near this self-inflicted thing we call Ground Zero, I will hold it as a memorial to the murdered Muslims whose lives have been sacrificed to the fears of the American population. The reason we don’t want it there is because we don’t want to be reminded. It would be like the Reich putting a synagogue in Auschwitz, or a slaughter house putting up a memorial to the cows it has killed. To kill someone you have to dehumanize them first and avoid any reminder of their humanity.
To Jews in particular who are outraged about this, I would remind you of the thing I learned on the first day of Holocaust studies in high school. The moment you see the least traces of this process of dehumanization — of anyone, not just those who are supposedly your own — is the time to be concerned.
Looking in the long run, there had to come a point where we felt guilty about what our society has stolen from the world and how we have arrived at a point where we cannot take care of our own because we refuse to define it in a way that exists outside the petty bounds of our individual egos; and from that we construct a national ego that is starting to resemble Archie Bunker more than FDR or Jefferson or Ben Franklin. Just remember every time you use your bifocals that Mr. Franklin refused to patent the idea because so many people needed them; same deal with the lightning rod, without which our buildings would all eventually be struck and burn down. There was a generosity to these souls, and we are about to consume the last of it.
Fear is not merely an ideology, and when fear is a way of life it speaks to a self-concept; and by definition that self-concept does not strive to take care of anyone else. It merely seeks to feed itself and what it feeds grows and what it feeds it loves. Then it seeks to exclude. Because of that we lose contact of the notion of taking care of anything or anyone, and actively strive to deprive others as if it somehow benefits the common good.
After the initial cheers & celebratory hugs in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected, the room calmed down, a dear friend shook his head and said, “The racial beast in America is about to awake.” I shrugged off his words still wanting to celebrate, but I have never forgotten them, and have repeated them more often than I would have liked.
The national questioning of Obama’s citizenship and talks of repealing the 14th Amendment that grants citizenship to anyone born on “our” land, as well as our current portfolio of laws in Arizona, prove his prediction. (I can’t imagine what will happen next, wonder what creative way they’ll go about questioning the citizenship of Native Americas.)
Rather than marching in the “post-racial” America, this presidency is testing our nation’s true ideology.
I was listening to the BBC today about the NY Landmarks Board moving ahead to refuse historic landmark designation of the area close to Ground Zero, to allow for the progress of the proposed mosque and cultural center. With that drama continuing to unfold, the Arizona immigrant scapegoating, and now the Virginia AG wingnut Cuccinelli saying that the immigrant status of all people picked up by the police in VA will be checked.
I read yesterday that Tea Baggers are approaching actors RE-ENACTING the roles of the white forefathers from the American Revolution, believing they are real, and asking the actor playing George Washington if he believed in the separation of Church and state.
What are we becoming?
There’s a major hard wiring disconnect from actual historical fact and current reality by most of the players using race-baiting and intolerance as their MO. Their world is very fragile. It feels so very incomplete, accepting the Disney version of social events, pissed off that somehow a perfect picture of their world has been damaged irreparably by women, gay people, our Black President, and knowledge.
I was thinking while listening to the BBC reporter, that if the race-and-culture-wars we’re watching is the Uranus-Saturn revolution we face in America, how can we put these shadows in our national consciousness to rest.
Another note everyone, tomorrow at 10:00 in SF, the circuit court is going to announce the judge’s findings on the Prop 8 (anti-gay marriage initiative) court challenge.
yeah, there is an interesting psychology about this… it seems some repressed shadow stuff comes into play with american citizens who were immigrants or children of immigrants projecting onto new immigrants/illegals their own insecurities now that they are established with jobs, living the american dream, etc.
there is a good treatise on this topic by a feminist, I want to say a french feminist, maybe even a lacanian, her name escapes me at the moment, but I will see I if I can dig it up… she talks about projecting our fears on the alien or foreigner….
the strange thing is, i’m much more liberal than my parents – who are one generation closer to immigrants than me – when it comes to immigration policy. my grandparents came to the us from italy with nothing. my parents did slightly better, but i was the first person in my family to go to college. on any given night you won’t find me watching lou dobbs and nodding…maybe my dad. and that really makes me think. he’s the one who could lose his job to the black market, not me, so whenever we get into it on this topic, i usually end up feeling like i don’t have the right to an opinion. there’s a lot of fear that there’s just not enough to go around.
thanks. this is a conversation all too never had, and i live on the border. i’m also one of those euro-americans that lost much of their roots (or ‘official’ knowledge of) in the process. one of the only stories i know (and probably the only ethnicity i can “officially” claim) is how my Swedish great-grandmother was born “under the Statue of Liberty” as her family approached Ellis Island. truth and variations aside, i have also learned growing up in this beautiful southwestern land that melting pot is often quite the misnomer, because the melting pot implies a certain homogenization or loss of distinction as it doesn’t always guarantee/allow the essential flavors to come through. one way i’ve heard it described is as more of a tapestry, where the individual threads and colors are still visible and discernible within the bigger picture, where all parts are acknowledged for their contributions. in my experience, this creates the appreciation to allow people to self-identify and not place them into the pre-categorized boxes we’ve constructed for them.
Nice to see, Eric.
I would add, that many of the people crossing the border from our southern neighbor, Mexico — similarly a melting pot– one country that is central to the immigration issue– also trace their ancestry to immigrants from other countries
(unless they are indigeneous — and the indigenous are usually not the ones that risk their lives to come here to work…)
i.e., I know a mexican citizen here illegally in the states since the age of 7 who is third generation irish paternally, sicilian maternally…
Didn’t expect this but well-said. This is definitely a pass-it-around post. Well… Many are. But this one needs to be repeated and repeated. Funny. I’ve been having fence-arguments with everyone these past couple of weeks. It’s probably not as simple as I argue it — but stop with the freaking fences.
Thanksthanks. I needed to read that.