Probably I should stage a one-chick boycott of the Washington Post blogs. It's been widely reported in the local media that the post is forcing their reporters to blog for no additional money. But I do still read them. And Mark Fisher's blog Raw Fisher had an article about th changing landscape of Culpeper, VA, where all the Borders Books and Cheesecake Factories are moving in. Naturally, the residents including a one Steve Jenkins whose family has been in Culpeper for 300 years, are blaming illegal immigrants.
I put up the following response:
If Steve's family has been here for 300 years, we KNOW what Steve's family did to the people who were already on the land that became his.
Today's immigrants don't want to give us smallpox-infected blankets, kill off our entire people, steal our land and make their own country or any of the stuff that Steve's relatives (and mine) did.
They just want a job. They want their kids to have a chance to go to college and have a better life. They want to pay into social security and get taken care of when they are old.
Who the hell are we to say "no?"
CC
6 comments:
I really like the Cheesecake Factory. If you like meatloaf, theirs is great. And also, so is their four cheese pasta with spaghettini.
But I'm on a diet so I can't go there right now. =(
I will not blame a man of today for what his ancestors may, or may not, have done 300 years ago. That is wrong. As for immigrants I welcome them if they came here legally.
I don't blame him for anything.
But whether or not he is to blame, he still profited from his own ancestors coming over here and behaving far less reasonably than today's illegal immigrants do.
CC
Has the man done anything to repudiate his ancestors' deeds? I don't blame today's U.S. government for what the U.S. government of the late 1700s and early 1800s did to promote slavery, but you'll notice that our government at least has apologized for that. In my experience, people with big beefs against immigrants tend to track with people who think Europeans treated Native Americans in a reasonable manner.
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