STORIES WE NEED TO KNOW

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore."

Seeing the photos of “the cavalry” down on the border is enough to make me sick. God, I hate those otherwise-unemployable scum - and I’m not talking about the Haitians.

Writing in this morning’s Bulwark, Alan Cross provided some information most of us likely don’t know:

“This past week when I saw 12-15,000 Haitian migrants come to Del Rio on the Texas-Mexico border looking for asylum, I was at first shocked by the mass numbers—especially considering Del Rio is 2,000 miles from Port-au-Prince. And then I remembered that this was just one more result of the ongoing suffering of the Haitian people. The Haitian diaspora, exacerbated by the 2010 earthquake and subsequent political and natural catastrophes, has been going on for years, with approximately 1.8 million Haitians living outside of Haiti, including 705,000 in the United States. It has been widely reported that the Haitian migration route for thousands of men, women, and children has been from Haiti to South America, then up through the dangerous Darien Gap through the jungles of Panama and Central America to Mexico, and eventually the United States.”

And then he wrote something that tears at the heart:

“Whatever one thinks about who should come here or how many or how we let people in, there is one aspect of this tragedy that we should be clear about: The Haitians who come to our border seeking refuge have suffered beyond the imagination of most Americans. How we see and treat them says a great deal about the state of our own hearts and consciences.

“Secure borders shouldn’t mean closed borders. We can make good, humane decisions about whom we allow to come based on need and merit. (At this point, how does turning away Haitians save the country from COVID?) Rejecting en masse thousands of people who come asking for help and looking for refuge creates even more desperation and tells the world that America has turned away from those in need. Seeing images of Customs and Border Protection agents on horseback swinging lariats at and pushing migrants back into the Rio Grande only adds to the impression that the American response is hard-heartedness towards the desperate and the vulnerable.”

Let’s be clear: the only groups of immigrants who didn’t get harassed by those who had arrived here before them were the passengers on the Mayflower and the adventurers who set up camp at Jamestown. Everybody else? Not so lucky.

Had my own Quaker ancestors bumped into North America 100 miles north of where they did 350 years ago, they’d have been delivered to the hands of the Good Pilgrim Fathers, a collection of crazies who came here because they’d been kicked out of Holland - Holland! Even then, the most liberal state in Europe! - for harassing everyone who didn’t believe their cramped, evil fundamentalism.

If they’d gotten hold of my ancestors, the women would have been burned as witches and the men would have had hot pokers run through their tongues to prevent them “speaking evil” ever again. For the crime of being Quakers. (Yes, the Pilgrims really did this, more than once)

So perhaps we’ve progressed - we’re only chasing them on horseback now and whipping them with the reins. Better than a witches’ stake and a hot poker. I guess.

70 years ago, my Lithuanian-refugee wife’s family arrived in New York when she was 3, having been born in a refugee camp in western Germany after the war. The family had gotten there from Lithuania because her mother spoke German well enough to convince an SS officer supervising the evacuation of refugees from Vilnius in the face of the oncoming Soviet military offensive that they were “Volksdeutsch,” i.e., ethnic Germans who were descended from settlers in Eastern Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, who the Nazis claimed to be protecting. She got her husband and son onto the refugee boat, and the Red Air Force warplanes that bombed them in the Baltic missed, and they got to Hamburg. Once in the camp, she convinced her husband - a non-smoker - to take his “cigarette ration”, which she then took with her out into the countryside to trade with German farmers for food to supplement their camp rations. (If you ever look up refugee stories, you’ll discover that the ones who save their families against all odds are almost always women - surprise, surprise.)

And when they got to Chicago and my wife started school two years later in the local Catholic school, the Irish kids - descendants of immigrants whose membership in the human race was questioned at the time of their arrival, who saw signs reading “Dogs and Irish - Keep Off The Grass” - mocked her and the others as “DP kids” and told them “Go back where you came from.”

The bullshit isn’t new.

And it’s easy to get infected with the virus.

Back in the 80s, when Reagan was defending the Contras as “the Founding Fathers of El Salvador,” Los Angeles filled up with refugees from the wars. They mostly didn’t speak English, and they were different, and then their kids formed gangs like “18th Street” and “Mara Salvatrucha” (now “MS-13") and they were changing a city that was in the midst of other big changes. Over time, the Lily White San Fernando Valley took on a darker hue, and all the sons and daughters of the GI’s who bought all those crackerbox houses that sprang up to replace the orange groves. By the time 1990 rolled around, if you lived in an apartment building in any part of the San Fernando Valley, “they” were going to show up as your neighbors. Strange. Different. They don’t speak English. I hear they eat dogs.

Allow me to say that I was one of those upset people, having had to leave my nice little house in the Hollywood Hills after a relationship went bad the middle of a “writing employment dry spell” and take up residence in a garden apartment complex in the “lower end” of Burbank. The apartment buildings on the rest of the street were filling up with “those people.” And then one day in late 1993, “they” moved in next door - husband, wife and only son. Rather than open my mouth and prove myself an idiot beyond all doubt, I kept my thoughts to myself and nodded when he would say “good morning” when we passed. But I kept my distance.

And then The Big One happened. At 4:30 in the morning of January 17, 1994 - Martin Luther King Day - I was abruptly awakened by an earthquake. We in the City of Lost Angles have a tendency to stay “not upset” for anything that registers under 4.0 - but this was no 4.0! It went on and on and seemed to last forever as the ground rolled and heaved. I would later thank my lucky stars I was living in a one-story garden apartment complex, rather than the multi-story buildings over here in the West Valley where I now live, that woke people up for moments at the most as the ceiling collapsed on them. It was bad enough that it took my cats a week to come out from under the bed where they’d taken refuge.

Finally, it was over. A flip of the light switch demonstrated we were without power. I stumbled outside. I looked up and saw an amazing sight: the heavens. All the constellations that are there every night, that are unseen other than the brightest in the light pollution of one of the world’s largest cities. I hadn’t seen the sky like that since I used to lie on my back on the deck of the old USS Rustbucket when we were at sea, and look up at a night sky that was so bright with stars I could read a book by the light.

“They” were already outside, sitting on a blanket in the courtyard. He looked up and greeted me and asked “Would you like some coffee?” He’d made it just before the quake, getting ready to go out to work. Yeah, I would, thank you very much. I sat down and drank the coffee. Really dark, strong enough to climb out of the cup and throw me against the wall a couple times. Just what the moment needed.

In moments of disorientation, sometimes you do the right thing. I asked if they were OK. They were. His name was Rudolfo, hers was Maria, and the boy was Ignacio. Hi, I’m Tom, sorry we haven’t spoken before.

There was nothing to do but sit there, drink coffee, look at the stars. He commented he hadn’t seen the night sky like that since he was in the jungle in southern Mexico as he made his way north. I told him about the ship.

Something told him he could talk further, and he did. He told me the story of how he had been a university student in San Salvador, had gotten involved in trying to start a union, and then had to flee when he was told his name was on a list from one of the (American-trained) Salvadoran Army death squads.

Hmmm... I think I have heard a story like that somewhere.

Then he told me about his wife. She was a Guatemalan Mayan, who had gone to the regional market town one day, to come home that night and find her village devastated from an Army raid - a “search and destroy” mission to get rid of “communist sympathizers” with the local guerillas who were fighting the most recent U.S.-installed General (he didn’t say all that, I knew it, being “politically aware”). She and her two sisters, who had run away into the forest when the soldiers came, collected what they could and started walking toward “el Norte.”

Hmmm... I think I have heard a story like that somewhere.

And then he told me how they had met, both of them working in a furniture factory here. When the 1986 Amnesty was announced, they’d jumped through the hoops and gotten legal residency. He proudly told me they’d both become “citizens” in 1993.

And then it dawned on me. I really had heard his stories before. In my family’s history.

James McKelvey came here in 1800, a refugee from “The ‘99", the only Irish rebellion against the English in which Catholics and Protestants fought the oppressor together. His name was on a list of those to be awarded “Lord Cornwallis’ Rope” (yes, the same failed general who lost North America, sent to Ireland to make sure England didn’t lose that colony - sound familiar?) when he took passage in steerage on the ship that left Belfast for America (he was one of the Protestant rebels).

Peter Klebber came here in 1641, after his community in Frankfurt-am-Main was destroyed during the Thirty Years War. The Protestants would take a town and kill all the Catholics they could find - and the Quakers. Then the Catholics would take the place and kill all the Protestants they could find - and the Quakers. Finally the Quakers got away.

I suddenly realized the only difference between me and my neighbor was a couple hundred years and an ocean.

By that point, the sun was rising on a new day. It really was. I was not the person who had gone to sleep the night before.

After that, Rudolfo and I were friends until they moved away the next year, after he saved enough to buy a small house up in Sun Valley. We stayed I touch. When you know better, do better.

His son graduated from UCLA Medical School as an M.D. in 2011. And those “DP kids” in Chicago who were born in a refugee camp? The older sister went into Tech in the early days and retired a few years ago “quite well off.” The youngest sister got a Ph.D. in Biology and became a professor at the University of Wisconsin. The middle sister graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in Art, came to Los Angeles, and found employment in the entertainment industry.

The doctor, the tech executive, the college professor, the artist - they should all have gone back where they came from, right?

When I sat down to write this, I was just reacting to that photograph and what I had read of Mr. Cross’ article.

The thing is, this country is This Country because in every generation, people “go to America, where all things are possible,” as my late friend, World War II flying ace Steve Pisanos - who once said to me “My life *is* the American Dream” - described his decision to come here after he found out the son of a poor streetcar conductor in Athens would never be allowed to become a pilot in the Greek Air Force.

My wife has told me her strongest memory of America is her first, when she looked out the porthole of the troopship that brought them to New York City, and framed in the window was the Statue of Liberty.

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!”

I now realize this is Post #2 about What Is To Be Done about our country. Like I said, this shit’s gone on since 1681, in every generation. We need to be outraged when we see that photograph of “the cavalry” driving people back into the river. We need to change that.

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