About Those Damn Mexicans

So there's this buzz going on right now on the left. Bush has made a political mistake and turned his so-called base against him. Some on Free Republic call for his impeachment. And I say, if only someone on Free Republic could spell impeachment...

Now's our chance. Finally we can get the higher ground by getting tough on immigration. We can take the Democratic Party away from the Move Ons and into victory by building this high wall and kicking immigrants back home. It's not just our right, it's our duty, now more than ever.

But why is that? We get our opinions or at least our water-cooler topics of conversation from the media. Why are we talking about immigration now and not four years ago? Simple. Four years ago we were busy debating the sanctity of marriage. Why haven't we talked about illegal immigration twenty years ago? Because we were talking about crack cocaine. Why haven't we been talking about damn Mexicans until now? Because we were talking about AIDS. And about hunger in Ethiopia. And the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And Iran and Lybia and Vietnam and inner-city violence and drugs and the morality of euthanasia.

And now? We have endless wars all over this crumbling planet, inner-city violence rises and wage decreases, people still go hungry due to economic policy dictated by the greed of the few, and people still die of AIDS. Yet somehow we dare talk about illegal immigration.

They're destroying our culture and our way of life - What culture are you talking about? I don't like to watch cars driving around in circles. I don't like backyard fireworks. I don't like wrestling. But it doesn't destroy my culture, just like my activities don't destroy your culture. When they cancel a Nascar race for an emergency discussion about Nabokov we'll talk. Meanwhile, drink your beer and shut up.

Security!!! Now more than ever!!! - It's been said before and I hate to repeat the obvious here, but the 9/11 attack wasn't done by illegal immigrants. This country was relatively safe without a wall, and it will continue to be relatively safe. People die from preventable car accidents, from an ill-conceived war on drugs, from poverty and hunger and even from boredom-driven suicide. People die. It's a fact of life.

They're stealing our jobs - Spend more time looking for a job rather than going online. Go to school and learn a trade. Become a philosopher. And what's so wrong about having people driven to work and succeed in a country that has lost its sense of self-pride? Democrats love to put their heads in the sand and hope for the best. They apologize to people in other countries, saying "Don't blame me. I didn't vote for him." But they're just as guilty as the Free Republican ignorant xenophobes, because one day they woke up, and not knowing why, they said, "Maybe he does have those weapons." The next morning they woke up and said, "I'm all for equal rights, but why do they have to call it marriage?" And yesterday they woke up, after five hundred years of illegal immigrants coming to this country, and they said,

They don't even speak English - Then teach them. Help them. You'll feel better about yourself in the morning.

Moving to the US

The day before I moved to the US, a news program in England talked about how most Americans don’t believe in evolution. They showed a protest where one guy said, “I don’t want my children to think they came out from a bunch of monkeys.”

The first car sticker I saw: “She’s not a choice, she’s a baby girl.”

Now, in other countries, Americans are considered the joke of the world, culturally able to do nothing but produce extravagant shows (on ice). On my first visit back to England, an old friend told me about a new reality show where regular people go into an island and try to survive. I said, “In America there’s also a show like that, only there one person is voted off the island every week, and the one that stays at the end gets a million Dollars.” Men, did they laugh. America, turning every interesting concept—like the testing of human endurance—into a game show.

So it took me a while to understand.

It took me a while to understand that a place where people have a right to protest against evolution is not necessarily a bad place; just a funny place. And that some people stick their beliefs on their cars and it’s not for me to judge, even if they’re wrong. And that screw that other show; the first season of Survivor was great because a bunch of people fought each other to become millionaires, and who cares about people stuck on an island for no good reason. Simple endurance’s got nothing on greed and competitiveness.

So I ended up liking this place. So what if people watch O’Reilly? What’s that got to do with me? So what if people buy Coulter’s books? So what if Buchanan preaches xenophobia and Limbaugh is a racist? A place where people like that succeed must, by definition, also include the best of humanity, with people doing what they can to end the war, and people working in small communities to pull children away from crime, and people making great music and great art because half of their country is insanely conservative.

And it’s true what they say about the American Dream: it’s been only seven years since I moved here and I’ve already become Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. The land of endless possibilities indeed.