The caregiver tending to me spoke with a familiar accent and sought to ascertain my worldly knowledge when I asked where he was from. The answer: “Haile Selassie.” In short, he was an Ethiopian emigrant seeking the American dream.
Donald Trump directs vitriol toward immigrants from East Africa, but I find the one I have met splendid folk. I am reminded that Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia, spoke before the League of Nations after Italy used poison gas in invading his country.
Benito Mussolini, meet Donald Trump. Il Duce was a jut-jawed narcissist, who invites comparisons with our 47th president. The two guys share a cruelty. Neither show(ed) respect for any law. Trump aide Stephen Miller puts it succinctly: Might makes right.
How does this affect us? Because emigres from places like Kenya and Ethiopia do our society’s grunt work, getting demonized and stigmatized while performing vital tasks. A priest from Kenya is part of the pastoral team at St. James Cathedral. Immigrants are also bulwarks of the agricultural industry that is the state’s most important economic engine.
Immigration and Custom Enforcement, ICE agents, the thugs doing Trump’s bidding, have invaded places of worship. They recently conducted a “brutal and violent detention,” in words of Catholic Bishop Joseph Tyson, outside a Home Hardware store in Yakima. A Shoreline man has been arrested in front of his son.
Bishop Tyson ministers to a largely Latino flock in his Central Washington diocese, but spoke to the condition of the nation in a homily for the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. “We live a social sickness,” he preached. “We live in a diseased social climate where migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers are subjected to dehumanizing and racially charged epithets from the highest elected officials of our nation.”
Nativism is an historic American disease. It manifested itself in the 1830s with the Know Nothing movement, which responded to immigration with a famous four words: “No Irish need apply.” A near century later, the Ku Klux Klan virtually took over Indiana, as compellingly chronicled in Timothy Egan’s recent book, A Fever in the Heartland. The Kluxers included pillars of their communities, until a sex scandal caused support to vanish.
Another century has passed, with another demagogue and his MAGA movement. The nativist disease has reached the White House, and it has seen masked ICE men in unmarked vans seizing adults in front of children, busting into homes and murdering two persons in Minneapolis. It is amazing, chilling for this to happen in America.
We are fortunate, however, to be a center of resistance. Protests Friday ranged from high school students in Auburn to demonstrations outside the Federal Building in downtown Seattle. Attorney General Nick Brown has challenged or joined in some 50 legal challenges to the MAGA man. Gov. Bob Ferguson has asked legislators to strip ICE agents of their masks and stay away from schools and churches.
We face a wider challenge, in Bishop Tyson’s words “to rehumanize our social order, to rehumanize migrants, refugees and asylum seekers and to see the humanity even in the many fine men who serve in law enforcement.” Trump, a profoundly corrupt man, should not be permitted to corrupt the country.
This state should take the lead with sweeping resistence if ICE targets us. We can show Trump and his supporting cast what America looks like and what America is made of.
This story also appears in The Cascadia Advocate.
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Truly one of your best.
Great post Joel. Immigrants are everywhere, have always been everywhere in this country. My own grandparents and great grandparents were undocumented immigrants from Germany. When my father was sent to Seattle for a physical and registration for the draft before WWII, my dad, whose birth was assisted by a Lummi midwife, had to find old neighbors to swear out documents to prove he was a citizen because he had no birth certificate and my grandparents had no documentation though they had owned property in Whatcom County and paid taxes for decades.
“We face a wider challenge, in Bishop Tyson’s words “to rehumanize our social order, to rehumanize migrants, refugees and asylum seekers and to see the humanity even in the many fine men who serve in law enforcement.” Trump, a profoundly corrupt man, should not be permitted to corrupt the country.”
This is mostly a very good article. But the time has come to stop externalizing the causes of our current plight. Most fundamentally, in Bishop Tyson’s terms we need to rehumanize ourselves, not someone else. Trump is not an alien force imposed upon America by hostile outside forces. We ourselves have created and empowered Trump. No one did this to us.
The world is always awash with megalomaniacal lunatics. They are never in short supply. What is new and different here is that a rich and powerful society has somewhat inexplicably decided to install a lunatic as its political savior. We need to figure out why we did that to ourselves. We won’t really be able to fix the problem until we do.
Part of the psychological convenience and appeal of the stark red versus blue mythology is that it allows each side to shed all responsibility for our common predicament. The reds blame the blues. The blues blame the reds. It’s all the other guy’s fault. But in the most basic way American society is a single diseased entity. The contributions of different components of the society may differ, but the entire enterprise is sick and needs to be healed. It’s time to stop pretending otherwise.
Living out in the sticks of rural Kitsap County, I know lots of MAGA supporters. Except for perhaps a few militant extremists with power fantasies, they are not bad people. They are mostly good people who have foolishly embraced a bad solution to real problems. And when we focus exclusively on rejecting the bad solution, we of course can conveniently continue to ignore the underlying causes. No real progress will occur until that changes.
A large cohort of politically unsophisticated folk have become disenchanted with America’s elites. In their blind anger they have been duped into following a charlatan. Yes, the charlatan must surely be deposed. But not simply in the name of restoring the elites. That ain’t gonna work.