Yet again, the corpulent, orange headed mouse slams people whose skin color he has a problem with. This time it’s a bunch of folks in Latin America and Africa who would like to come into the country and, at least to start, do the kind of work mostly no native born Americans care to do. Never mind that a huge percentage of these people are better educated, more ambitious, and more serious about their future than Trump and his trusty base of ignorant xenophobes who try to make the country safe for white people by keeping non-whites out.
Even worse, the Republican Party saw its chance when the Tea Party emerged from the mud in 2010 and it sold its soul for raw power.
I confess I’m a shitholer, too, I guess, in a manner of speaking. My paternal great grandfather came from a shithole called Ireland—made such by hundreds of years of British oppression. My swarthy, olive skinned maternal great grandparents tried but never made it to the USA—mostly because the Ottoman Turks murdered them both. Their kids, among whom was my grandfather, did get here, however.
One grandfather, the Armenian, made a small fortune in San Francisco real estate. Not bad for a kid who apprenticed out to a cobbler in the old country. The other grandfather sailed windjammers up and down the Pacific Coast from Alaska to San Francisco, and later retired as a brewer, all the while rearing his own family and dabbled in “inventing,” hoping to find El Dorado in one of his ideas.
I’m guessing that you, too, have a similar story. And maybe you’re even as proud of your antecedents as I am of mine. And you may be as proud of them as are the sons and daughters of that Somali or Cuban MD who came here to practice a better brand of medicine. Or to build homes. Or open stores.
Donald J. Trump is just the latest iteration of a class of American people who have been afraid of non-natives and Afro-Americans really since the beginning of the republic. At times Germans, Slavs, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, were all restricted. The Chinese were even excluded by a law in1882 which wasn’t removed until 1943, in the middle of the war.
These outbreaks of immigrant bashing are just historical realities which American people of good will have had to deal with for generations; but when the President of the United States is caught talking about “shithole countries” and too many Haitians, what has been a more or less persistent national sore among family members now comes to be seen as a full out declaration of who and what we are as a people by the rest of the world. The words on Liberty’s book become a cruel joke. Meaningless.
Trump is our Ambassador of Ill Will. He is a shameless, incurious, criminal, immoral, self-hating sociopath with the character of a despot. Would it be not be for the Republican congressional majority cynically propping him up to achieve its own goal of transferring what’s left of middle class wealth to its ridiculously wealthy benefactors, Trump would likely be standing trial in the well of the Senate.
So, here’s to that despicable Donald Trump’s shitholers, one and all. They are the ones who made this country what it has always worked toward being, which is a place for all to chase their dreams and live in peace. We are still a work in progress as a nation and in the long run, even a Donald Trump can’t change our particular arch of history for very long.