“We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country,” Donald J. Trump, president of the United States of America, tweeted June 24.
Isn’t it amazing that so many European-Americans hold fast to the idea that the U.S. of A. is their country? They’ve been here only a little more than four centuries. The original occupants had been here for 17 millennia, give or take a century or two; they had gotten used to the quaint notion that this land was their country, until the “palefaces” came barging in and settling down without so much as a by-your-leave. For the next three centuries, the newcomers conducted the biggest land grab in the whole history of humankind.
I sometimes wonder what might have happened had the Native Americans had the same immigration policy our accidental president espouses, such as zero tolerance. For one thing, I might not have been here to pen these pearls of wisdom; for another, you, dear reader, would not have been here to read them. The first “Americans” might have continued to live the lifestyle handed down to them by their ancestors rather than having their land, their cultures, and their languages taken away from them and being pushed into concentration camps, a.k.a. reservations.
Yet, as I have stated previously, humans always have been creatures on the move, whether they were looking for greener pastures or satisfying their curiosity. One supposes that it was inevitable that Europeans came to the New World and saw what to them were large swaths of unused territory. Even though, they had descended from hunter-gatherer peoples, they had forgotten that hunter-gatherers needed large territories in which to forage. And so, they came, they saw, and they conquered (to paraphrase Julius Caesar). They were the real invaders.
Today, Native Americans are united against a common enemy, the U.S. government. Once, they were not, and that lack of unity was their downfall. They protected their individual territories jealously and even fought wars over contested lands. As far as the “palefaces” were concerned, some “Indians” were friendly, and some were hostile. It made no difference, however. The hostiles were outmanned and outgunned, literally, and were steamrollered; and the friendlies were despoiled as soon as their usefulness came to an end.
So, now we have progressed from “the only good Injun is a dead Injun” to “they want to steal our jobs.” I suggest that we should examine the exact nature of the jobs the immigrants are “stealing.” For the most part, they are menial, low-paying jobs, picking produce for 10 hours a day, cleaning rich peoples’ houses, digging ditches, for example, jobs that even African-Americans don’t want because they remind them of the slave system which once infested the Republic. The migrants do this work because they earn more money here than what they earned, if they earned anything at all, in their homelands. And they pay taxes on those earnings.
Of course, there are some bad apples in the basket. There are bad apples in all of the baskets. I’ve seen some in my own ethnic group, and so have you, dear reader. Do those bad apples make you one as well? I didn’t think so.
Our Bigot-in-Chief, I can imagine, if he had been president in 1876, would have rained down fire and fury on the “Indians” for what they did to General Custer at Little Bighorn in June 142 years ago. He has been labeled by some pundits, including yours truly, as the worst president ever. He has made his unthinking loyal followers happy as clams by reviling immigrants of color and is not ashamed. And neither are his loyalists. Shame is not in their dictionary. Civility has quite flown out the window in these Disunited States, never to return as long as he is in office.
Therefore, he must be turned out of office ASAP. Impeachment, anyone?
Just a thought.