Warning!
This gem of intolerance showed up in the paper today, titled “Americans push back.” It’s a flying-spittle response to my letter two days ago, more or less confirming my suggestion that immigrants are the scapegoat du jour for scared white Americans. Can you imagine?! Uppity Mexicans and indigenous people wanting their country back?! Immigrants wanting to speak their own languages and practice their own traditions?!
We really were better than this.
— Jacques d’Nalgar, Wednesday, August 17 2016 CE
Americans push back
Dear editor:
[Jacques d’Nalgar]’s letter of Aug. 15 was a rant about how horrible America has become. His final paragraphs said “America, once upon a time, we were a beacon of hope and hospitality for the strange[r], the refugee, the suffering child.” “America, we use to be better than this.” True but that was when people came here to become Americans. They came to assimilate. They did not come to turn America into the garbage dump they left like the Muslims are. They did not come and establish their own court systems based on their religion and insist that Americans adhere to their demands or die. They did not come and insist that part of America is, in fact, part of their old country as the Mexicans are doing in California.
This push back against immigrants has been brought about by the immigrants themselves. They come here demanding free housing, medical care, welfare and that we, true Americans, revise our traditions and country to meet their demands. The national anthem is offensive; the Pledge of Allegiance is forced assimilation.
This is America and if you don’t want to be a part of our country as an American with our traditions, then go home. This is an attitude developed by hardworking Americans as a push back against ungrateful immigrants who did not want to stay in the hell holes they came from and only want to remake America into what they left at our expense.
Robert Freeman Jr.
Bonnerdale
1 comments
Author
Have we lost our will to be better?
Dear editor:
It saddens me to see a letter such as that by Robert Freeman Jr on 17 Aug 2016. It denies the history of America to suggest that only Muslims came here to turn the country into “the garbage dump.” It denies the sad story of the Gilded Age when previous immigrants met the same resistance, when every third storefront had a sign “No Irish Need Apply,” when the only housing in cities were ‘dumbbell tenements’ with little light, air and few toilets. Successive waves of “Scandahoovians, Roosians, Krauts” you name it came to be greeted with their own ethnic racist labels. Any American with MidWest relatives can bear witness to the truth of the stories of persecution of each new wave of hopefuls ‘yearning to be free.’
Those that persecuted them were Americans that preceded them, that built the tenements, that set starvation wages, that refused to provide basic water and sanitation, that set the bailiffs on them with clubs when they dared to organize and refused to continue intolerable existence. And now we hear a new set of lies, they want their own law (not true), they demand free housing, medicine (not true) and probably unlimited access to reruns of “Duck Dynasty” or other examples of cultural excellence which is why they came in the first place.
Immigrants, especially refugees, have very few demands. The most important is perhaps the right to life itself. Another may be food for their children, another escape from an oppressive regime which dictates how they will worship and persecutes those who do not obey. The shoe is beginning to bind a bit when we proclaim freedom, but then object to “other” practices, other languages, other customs. Sinclair Lewis in “The Jungle” well described the hell-hole Americans built for foreign economic slaves, but make no mistake but that it was a previous wave of immigrants that built the slums and tenements for the new wave of ‘poor, huddled masses yearning to be free.”
A final question, food for thought, if you are ever moved to ponder a bit on the plight of humanity: if as Mr. Freeman says these are “ungrateful immigrants who did not want to stay in the hell holes they came from …” just who made it a hell-hole?
Who has bombed the Middle East into rubble? It was not that way when a friend of mind who grew up there shows us pictures of beauty, vibrant street life, teeming streets? It was not that way when I traveled there and enjoyed street food from friendly vendors before the Bush regimes began to find new enemies or new oil resources to ‘protect’ and exploit. Just whose bombs, whose tanks and artillery created that rubble?
It saddens me to know my country and its allies have destroyed cities, communities, neighborhoods causing untold suffering by innocents, bakers, cobblers, weavers, wives and children who had the misfortune to be born in proximity to a resource coveted by capitalists. Mr. Freeman, am I not allowed to be saddened, to feel a tear on my cheek at the plight of those who share an experience with my own Irish ancestors?
Stephen Orr Manning
near Hot Springs