Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? Time and again, we make the weakest among us our scape-goats for our frustrations of the moment. The immigrants, or the blacks or the Jews or the Asians… or whoever else we find that doesn’t resemble “us” and is powerless to resist.
And that’s the other great realization we are just beginning to grapple with… the white population of America is fading into a minority as the myriad skin colors from Earth’s palette have washed over the centuries and become Americans too, to the point where their rainbow of colors has finally moved “us” into minority status, like it or not. “We” just didn’t see that coming.
And for the unfolding of the last two decades, our frustrations have centered on lost manufacturing jobs that used to serve as main-stays to a steady, well-paying, life-time job with benefits, but the computers and robots and outsourcing to developing countries disrupted this and no longer are career assembly jobs at one of the manufacturing giants a thing that we can depend on with a high school education or GED.
Many of us followed our parent’s paths into careers that eventually vanished as technology grew everywhere and suddenly, we found ourselves caught off-guard, and grasping at cross-training or frantically seizing opportunities in new career fields that we were blindly hoping would solve our problems and lead us to prosperity. After down-sizing and lay-offs and eventual plant closings everywhere, we sought and found part-time jobs to pay the bills, one, two, or even three poorly paying jobs would keep the rent paid and food on the table, but little more. This was not the American Dream we grew up remembering, and as we’ve lived through the last few, tumultuous years, this is not the Norman Rockwellian America our parents would have expected to find. Again, we should have seen this coming, but denial of our approaching reality was easier and for the moment, painless.
As for the new status “we” now play in the fabric of our country, like all the others in our history, we will fit in where we can, and the whole will be all the stronger for our part within it. Remember too, that we initiated this… we began cheating Native Americans out of their homes upon our first meeting. We imported black men and women to toil on our behalf, yet they, along with the Asians built our rail systems, grew our agriculture, and found their place in this new world and raised their families.
And when Europeans wanted to immigrate here, we made them our scape-goats for it was their turn to pay for our frustrations and woes, yet they brought their crafts and trades to our shores, and built our great cities, established our banking systems and enriched our country immeasurably. The Irish, the Italians, the Germans and Japanese, the Catholics, the Protestants, the Buddhists, Muslims and the Jews, all villains in their time, all sacrificed so “we” might have something to vent our bigotry and sense of failure upon, rather than face our shortcomings and peer open eyed into reality. Yet, they did not come empty handed, for they brought their cultures, their music, their art in every sense and further enriched this new world with their seasonings from the old world they had abandoned.
Over the last few years, it’s been the South and Central Americans and the Mexican’s turn to pay for our failures in life, and so, we’ve incarcerated them at our borders and essentially thrown the key away. We’ve officially announced to the people of the Earth, “The new world is closed. You are no longer welcome.”
And then came a deadly Virus to envelop our planet, as if to focus on the chaos and inequity we were busy sowing everywhere, in all countries across the land, and to level the great and wealthy and smug strata of earth’s societies with the masses who had been struggling all along to find daily sustenance and a warm, safe place to sleep at night.
Look about you now, and see what is happening in our cities this day… while our leaders remain silent and small and impotent and insignificant in the face of a reality, we have worked centuries to cultivate; now it seems, we are reaping what we have sown, and the fruit is bitter and poisonous and lethal.
Is this the reality that historians will record as our legacy? Is this the best we were capable of? Will this be our contribution to the new world? Is this really how we wish to be remembered?
The irony is, of course, that “we” were all immigrants to this new world at some moment in history, and have no more claim on this soil than any other citizen of our land. And there were countless thousands of others before us, of many-colored skins and faiths and origins who gave everything to leave something for future generations, and we have no greater claim or legacy than do our neighbors, and rather than criticize or condemn others, we should simply be grateful that we were fortunate to have had our moment of life spent in a land and country that was the envy of the world, and that when others sought a better life for their families, as our forefathers once did, they thought of life in the new world…in our America.