Help Wanted

  This sign hangs prominently in my house. It was printed in Boston in 1915, more than sixty-three years after the Irish Potato Famine, a natural disaster that resulted in two million Irish washing up on America's shores. I doubt those two million thought they'd ever have to leave, but they were starving. I keep the sign because it reminds me of who I am, where I'm from, and the bigotry experienced by the people who came before me.

  This week has been one of those weeks -- one of those times that tests who we are as a people-- 350 million Americans most of whose stories began in another place far away from here.  Those who didn't, those whose land this was, have every right to say, "If you are going to live here, the least you can do is learn to speak Dakota, Navajo, Ojibwa, Apache, or Yupik." It was their land we took, it was never ours to have.

  The first arrival on one side of my family, was Thomas Baker, an Irish lawyer and author of seditious pamphlets, and ...ahem, purportedly an explosives expert, having blown up a British police barracks. There were fatalities, arrest warrants were produced, and he left as they say, by the dark of the moon with his neck intact.  That's the story anyway. I doubt he'd make it through customs today. He'd no doubt be on every no-fly list in the world.  One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. It's all about perspective.

  On the other side I am descended from people who were persecuted religiously-- Dutch/Russian Mennonites. The Russians didn't believe in conscientious objections. "Nyet" often resulted in a bullet to the head. My Mennonite ancestors escaped Crimea and found their way to Minnesota in the 1870's. They promptly took advantage of the Homestead Act (immigrants who took advantage of a government program- yes indeed) and settled in for the long haul. My grandmother and grandfather used  that same Homestead act in the 1920's and gobbled up 320 acres of free land in North Dakota, the Homestead Act finally being unwound in 1967.  The last free land was in Alaska.

   Not so long ago the geography that is now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California belonged to another country --Mexico. Some of it we took because we wanted it, some of it we bought. But the thing is, it wasn't ours.

  So here we are, with millions of our citizens spitting and howling because there are people who want to come here to escape persecution, to keep their kids safe, to freaking stay alive. Take a look in the mirror. Who are you? What are the stories of the people that resulted in you being in this place? Some weren't planning on coming here at all. Whether you wandered in through Montreal as Thomas Baker did, or Ellis Island, most all of us are descended from immigrants who arrived here with the shirts on their backs --if they were lucky.

  It's nothing more than random chance that any of us was born in the United States. Call it Karma, the fickle finger of fate, or providence, those people on our southern border didn't do anything bad that resulted in them being born elsewhere.  Look at any one of those asylum seekers, there but for the grace of God go you, me, any of us. Ask yourself this: if something horrendous happens, plague, famine, bio-terrorism, and you have to leave with nothing, will Canada take you in? We aren't immune. There is no special grace for us. We've just been lucky.

  On the one hand the lack of empathy, the hate speech, the sheer hostility that has been exhibited this week about some of the most vulnerable people on the planet, immigrant babies and children, has left me speechless, gut punched, with its venom. Yet, I also see millions of Americans rise to the occasion and do what they can, reporting flights, watching for signs of 2300 kids in their communities, reporting back so secret camp sites can be noted and mapped. Secret camps. For kids. We'll get to the bottom of it, millions of us are on the job. This will be exposed for the horror that it is. And once again, we will be ashamed. I hope we will be ashamed enough not to do it again. But I wonder, because it seems, this is who we are, have always been, from Native American genocide to the bondage, systemic and violent racism against our African American population and Japanese internment camps.  It's time to sit with that for awhile, try to make sense of what it means.

  Almost all of us came from somewhere else. Apparently we need to be reminded.