god Fearin’ ‘Mericans: the Rest of the Story

Through the magic of internet streaming I can choose to occasionally blend the sounds that fly though my open casement from the Seine below with some hometown radio.

It is an interesting mix.

I typically listen to streaming as I prepare dinner.

That streamed hometown radio station is KUOW Seattle – Public Radio.

I just heard a great quote on The "Tavis Smiley Show”: "Rich kids get taught; poor kids get tested". 

So, as long as I have begun to mount my editorial high horse I have another observation driven by something I also heard on NPR.

On "The Takeaway" yesterday I heard an interview with a woman (last name Chomsky - no mention of a famous relative) who put substance to a thing that makes me begin to scream and rant every time I hear a god fearing republican begin to chant his or her mantra about immigration.

What I think, in opposition to the gfr mantra, follows.

Our "Immigration Law" is an unconscionably designed artifice whose mission is to convert an otherwise vital, enthusiastic and upwardly mobile population of brown skinned people, mostly from Mexico - guts brought them here and guts have sustained them since they have been here (just like the colonists of the 1600s) - into felons.

It is an arbitrary and capricious law that says that someone who exercises the human right of going somewhere where he or she can possibly improve his or her condition, and the condition of his or her children, is guilty of a crime similar to burglary and murder.

There seems to be a lack of balance with this law and with its implicit viewpoint, I have always thought.

I have also always thought that the law has a real and vicious purpose having nothing to do with “immigration” or “security”.

Here is what I can’t stop thinking about that law.

That law gives the white power structure the ability to decry as “criminals” a vibrant and aggressive population that they - the power structure - deem to be a threat to their privileged selves and their privileged, but otherwise lacking much in the way of special merit, children and grandchildren.

That law gives various nuts, Klansmen, political opportunists, hatemongers and demagogues - Ted Cruz, a famous Canadian immigrant to America, comes to mind - the fodder for their various self serving "god fearin' 'Merican" (read white) speeches.

I cannot remember a time in my life in which I did not think that our strength comes from our diversity and the admixture of human strains that that diversity will inevitably foster.

How could/can I have been so far off the mark?

I’m sure ol’ Ted has a lot of slime to throw on a question such as that.