Immigrant Story

I'm struggling, not so much with how to think about the current political climate in this country, but how to talk about it and write about it. Decades of experience now in internet and email communication provides plenty of evidence that people do not change their opinions based on anything they read on the internet, they only yell at each other in the comments. But I think it has value to normalize the idea that compassion and equal opportunity are important to many Americans. And it may not have value, but it's still the right thing to do, to undermine and delegitimize the voices promoting cruelty, isolationism, cronyism, and the influence of money over political thought and action.

So, anyway, we went tubing and eating and shopping in Gruene, TX last weekend. That's pronounced "green," by the way. At least around these parts.

The internet tells me that Ernst Gruene was a German immigrant in the mid-1840s. The internet also tells me that more than a million Germans came to the United States around this time, many of them farmers struggling to succeed and seeking cheaper land. Some were political and religious refugees. I'm not well enough versed in history to know if they were fleeing rape and murder by local gangs who rose to power in destabilized nations whose political systems and economies were negatively impacted by decades of U.S. interference on behalf of corporate interests. I'm thinking probably not. They came here for a new life, though. For themselves. For their children. They came to acquire land that was cheap and abundant due to the systematic destruction of the native populations who had previously been residing on that land. I don't think that particular economic benefit is available any longer to the huddled masses, yearning to be free. I think it's all been taken at this point.

Maybe we can give the Gruene family, and particularly Ernst's son Henry, the benefit of the doubt that their cotton farming operation was established post-Juneteenth and wasn't built on slave labor. Even so, it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine that some of those "families working on his cotton farms" were sharecroppers. So maybe it was built on cheap former slave labor, labor systemically kept cheap by racist land policy, lending policy, outright violence, and a whole host of other methods I'm not really smart enough to fully understand. But, you know, we can talk about those good old days of immigration when (white European) people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and worked hard and culturally assimilated and learned the language and became real Americans.

Oh, and speaking of the whole "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" notion, have you heard the idea that it originally meant exactly the opposite of the meaning that's attributed to it today? While we say it as a way of describing people lifting themselves up entirely through their own efforts, it's likely that it was originally used to describe an actual impossibility. If one were, let's say, to find themselves literally standing in a 10-foot deep pit, they could not, no matter how much they pulled, grab onto the straps at the top of their fine Texas cowboy boots and lift themselves right out of that pit. It is a ludicrous idea, a comical mental image, that may have first been used in an 18th century collection of old folk tales. Anyway. Now we use it unironically to suggest that someone rose in economic status entirely through their own will, determination, and effort. Which really is an impossible task, when you think about it. We all help each other, believe it, or like it, or not. We are a cooperative society. We all benefit from public works and infrastructure, some of us more than others. We all pay taxes regardless of actual individual benefit from the specific uses of those taxes, some of us more than others. Anyway. This is what the internet tells me. This is what I'm almost, but not quite, smart enough to begin to wrap my head around.

So we went tubing on the river and had a fine time. And I watched all those drunken mostly white folks use public spaces as if they were theirs, exclusively. There were empty beer cans floating in the river. There were plenty of speakers floating along with the beer coolers, blasting competing brands of mostly country music. So many of those people seemed so comfortable in their right, or maybe obligation, to impose their wills and tastes on the rest of us while they filled the fresh river air with clouds of secondhand smoke. My favorite song I was forced to listen to was, "Fuck You Bitch" by Wheeler Walker, Jr.

Yes, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, we are living in a time that devalues civility.

Again I say: anyway. I don't know that I have a point. I know that these are likely my people, these German immigrants to the town of Gruene that redefined itself as a charming little tourist spot after catastrophic economic collapse due to an environmental disaster that could be said to have arisen from a commercial approach to farming that undervalues crop diversity. And relies heavily on underpriced immigrant labor. I don't really know my own ethnic makeup with any certainty or degree of detail. I have some Dutch blood. Probably some German too. My sister would know. She's done the family tree research. She tells me we have branches of the family tree that span both sides of the Civil War battle lines. We settled all over, including Nebraska, and Kansas, and Colorado, and Kentucky, and now Texas.

The discrepancies in thought and rhetoric about 19th century white immigrants and 21st century brown immigrants is disturbing to me. The belief that people are flowing in droves over unsecured borders in order to prey upon us righteous Americans as rapists, murderers, and drug pushers hurts my heart. The idea that those droves are coming in order to take economic advantage of us by cynically latching onto our generous social welfare programs and never get back off again is ridiculous. People flee their homes and come here today, whether from Somalia, North Korea, or Venezuela, or Mexico, Honduras, or Guatemala, for precisely the same reasons all of our ancestors came here, whenever they came here: to make a better life for themselves and their children. They are fleeing death, and when they get here, we take their children from them and lock them up, sometimes for years, for what is a misdemeanor at worst. We are gaming the system against them. For what? For why? I don't know. I'm not smart enough to understand it, and the internet, as it always does, will give me any answer to the question that I want it to give.

I appeal to you: Look at the world through a lens of compassion. Act and vote and write and speak and post from the perspective that every person deserves the same chance, the same opportunity, the same treatment. Ask yourself: what would I do if there were no safe place for me? To what lengths would I go to keep my children safe? Do we really want to be the nation, the people, who deliberately create danger in order to deter people from fleeing danger?

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus, November 2, 1883