What will our country look like twenty years from now -- in another generation?
I think the immigration issue comes down to that one question and the irrational fears the answer to it arouses in otherwise decent, intelligent people: fear of "the other"... of change... of not having enough... of the unknown.
Fear - that same powerful manipulator of the masses that convinced a nation of seemingly rational citizens to rush headlong into a pre-emptive war that has cast a dark cloud over whatever dreams we had for the way our country will look like in the future. Now, as the fear of Saddam's mushroom clouds loses its grip on our collective consciousness, a new fear is being strategically nurtured to keep us united as we leap like lemmings into the abyss -- fear of the illegal alien!
Yesterday,
a group of people gathered on one side of a street corner in Vista. Mostly Latino, many speaking Spanish, they carried signs reminding their tormenters that day workers are often legal immigrants and American citizens. Separated at the vortex by police donned in riot gear, a very different group of human beings congregated around the corner - white, English speaking, angry and afraid. Afraid our country will look less like them twenty years from now.
As a candidate for Congress in this district, the time has come to declare which side of the corner I stand on. I've spent months listening to both sides and, seeing no simple answers, hoped that sanity would eventually prevail and this issue would be revealed as a the huge distraction it is from the real issues. Issues that will have a profound effect on the world we pass on to our children. If elected in November, I will be bound to represent all of the people of my district, not just the ones I can easily agree with. It's not my job to rush to judgment, but to listen, observe, study and then act in the best interest of everyone. I've come to the conclusion that it's in our best interest to reveal the smoke and mirrors that are blowing the immigration issue all out of proportion.
The angry Minutemen waving flags around the corner from me were right about one thing, our country is probably going to look different twenty years from now, and part of the difference will be in the appearance, heritage and perhaps even language of the majority of our citizens. Five hundred years ago, I could have prophesized the same thing to the indigenous people of this land. No wall or fence, smart or otherwise, is going to stop desperate people from seeking a better life for their families. No laws, no weapons, no prayers, have ever stopped "the other" from migrating to greener pastures. My Sicilian ancestors learned this better than anyone. At one time or another, every race and Western civilization took its turn at transforming the "look" of that beautiful Mediterranean island. And when my grandparents, the product of so much ethnic diversity, came to America, they were called waps and guineas and held in contempt by those whose own ancestors had made their way here only a generation or two earlier. My parents, first generation Americans, graduated college and my siblings and I grew up in a middle class neighborhood with little awareness of the suffering and sacrifices endured to make that possible.
I too am afraid of what our country will look like in the next generation. I fear that global warming will make much of our planet uninhabitable, and the relentlessly expanding population of our planet will be squeezed into increasingly smaller, barely habitable areas. I fear that the trillions of dollars of debt this administration has bequeathed to our descendants will ultimately result in a global economic depression and loss of the middle class. I fear that oil will grow scarce and our mobile society will grind to a halt because our leaders failed to develop alternatives. I fear that the citizens of America will be so distracted by this deliberate hype about illegal immigration that they will not notice the systematic theft of the freedoms they think are their birthright.
It's not too late to get to work on these dire threats to our future, but the fact that it wasn't any of this, but instead, fear of the other, that actually motivated so many angry people to get off their easy chairs to go protest on a street corner at 8:00 AM on a cloudy Saturday morning... that scares the hell out of me!