The anti-immigration crowd is reaching new levels of hysteria. It's not enough to scapegoat Mexicans; now the blame has expanded to ... the Polish! I hadn't really intended to post anything tonight, but I'm feeling slightly indignant, though I know that buffoonery like this is pretty marginal stuff. I'm Polish, you see, so I felt the urge to respond.
Get this crazy progression, from a Mitt Romney rally in the Chicago (!) suburb of DuPage:
When Norma Green, a 78-year-old real estate agent, resplendent in a red sweater, said she "couldn't put her finger" on why she didn't like McCain, her son, Ken Wisdom, interjected, "Oh, [that's] easy, Mom. It's amnesty, amnesty."
"Oh yes, amnesty," she said.
Wisdom, a 57-year-old union plumber, became emphatic: "It's not just Hispanics. It's Russians, Polish, Romanians, Pakistanis all coming. We are in a race to become a third world country. For a country not well liked in the world, people sure like to come here."
Yes, we pesky Eastern Europeans will take over this country yet, and reduce you all to pierogi-eating peasants!
Oh, we've been at this a long time. It all started back in the Revolutionary War, in which Polish-born Tadeusz Kosciuszko fought as a colonel, later to be promoted to brigadier general. His plan was so brilliant, so devious, that it duped poor Thomas Jefferson into calling him "as pure a son of liberty as I have ever known."
He only appeared to be fighting for Ken Wisdom's right to speak like a cretin.
But it didn't stop there. Hordes of Polish immigrants, like my own ancestors, worked their asses off in the steel mills because it was their dream to pull down the Republic and in its place build a third-world nation. They endured discrimination and those long, hard hours because they knew that in the end their progeny would team up with the Russians and Romanians and Pakistanis and Mexicans to tear the American Dream asunder. They just fought in World War II alongside Ken Wisdom's own ancestors to make it look like they gave a shit.
My own mother, who spoke Polish on the streets of Western Pennsylvania in her youth (after having been born near Chicago, of all places), was definitely part of the program. You might think she became the first woman in her family to attend college, and then was among the first women at that college to receive a science degree, so that her family might have a better life, and so that her children would have many opportunities she never did. Or that she went on to get her Ph.D. in education while working another job and somehow getting her kids through college so that she could go on and inspire thousands of young Americans to get turned on to science through her engaging approach to teaching. Oh, so naïve. She was clearly setting the table for further devious deeds by people like me.
You might think I was inspired by what she did and wanted to make good on the opportunities she and those that raised her had so painstakingly made available to me. You might mistake my own Ph.D. and thus-far highly successful industrial career as an attempt to help build the future of my own family and this country. Oh, but that's just what I want you to think. Forget that I helped build a startup industrial biotech company into a publicly-traded entity that is helping to alleviate our reliance on fossil fuels. That's all just a charade. Smart people like Ken Wisdom can see it. Why can't you?
In conclusion, Ken, you can roll that attitude into a little ball and shove it way, way up your xenophobic ass. Srocze pies!
If the urge ever strikes you to denigrate somebody because of their ancestry, or what language they happen to speak, just think of Ken Wisdom. Don't be an asshole like him.
Thank you, and have a lovely evening.
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