THE OTHER

 

 

Ok, so we are all French now but no Syrians allowed in our State.   Gosh, it’s hard following the trends today.  I’ve given up.  I did not change my profile picture the French flag and I did not beg everyone to pray for Paris.  I did add the “Refugees Welcome” profile app. though because I am ashamed to live in a state where the Governor thinks it’s cool to issue an illegal proclamation to ban Syrian refugees from our borders.  He did say if he knew for certain they were Christians it would be different   He probably prayed for France in his church on Sunday.  I’m so impressed.

Does the internet make it easier to hate?  It certainly seems more rampant than ever.  I feel like I grew up in a bubble, but Brooklyn, New York seems an unlikely place for a bubble.  Especially a low income housing project.  I did experience hate and racism more than once, however.  Strangely, it was from my dark-skinned neighbors, black and Puerto Rican.  We became a tiny minority as our white neighbors improved their socioeconomic standing and moved to the better neighborhoods.  We moved too, but it took us longer and we never made it to Long Island, only to a co-op apartment on the Lower East Side.  But I digress.

I was set upon by other children who immediately recognized in me someone they could intimidate.  Black children who I thought were my friends began to shut me out.  An Italian mother in my neighborhood accused me of calling her son a “wop” or a “guinea”, I forget which, because I had never heard either term before.  We didn’t call people names in my home.  I was once attacked by girls on a street in my neighborhood; they tried to steal my purse, I didn’t let them so they stuck me (in my rear end) with an icepick.  So, yes, there was hate in my bubble.  I just don’t understand why I didn’t catch it. 

After college, I worked in a low income housing project.  Most of my co-workers were black; I had a lot of fun with them and they seemed to like me pretty much.  It was scary walking around the apartments though; then, as now, “the projects” were centers of drug dealing and using.  When I worked in an agency that helped blind children, I had to make home visits; there were many times I didn’t feel safe.  Still, I don’t remember ever feeling that hate I see so much of today.

The rational for excluding the refugees is that terrorists might sneak in with them.  I guess Nazis could have snuck in with the Jews or Communists snuck in with the Hungarians and Cubans who were refugees here over the years.  I never heard that mentioned, though.  One argument I got on Facebook was that when our ancestors (Eastern European Jews) came over escaping the Tsar’s regime and other virulent anti-Semitism, our country was different.  There was more room for refugees.  The poster seemed to miss what things were like back them; crowded cities, teeming tenements, children working in factories, etc.  Then, as now, refugees who can make it out with some cash assets can survive much better than dirt poor farmers and laborers with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

It’s easy to hate and reject whoever is lower than you on the socioeconomic scale.  Middle class whites can hate blacks who can hate Mexicans and now, Syrians.  Jews used to have horns and drink the blood of Christian babies; Muslims all follow the dictate of killing everyone who is not a Muslim.  I grew up in a much simpler time; there were only Irish and Italian Catholics to mistrust from my group, the Jews.  At least until the black Southerners and Puerto Ricans began arriving en masse.

It’s nothing new of course.  It gets so tiring to keep putting forth the same common sense, reality-based arguments that the haters will never even listen to.  Shortly after I came to Waycross there was a program sponsoring Vietnamese refugees active in Waycross.  The issue was not that they were dangerous, but that they were stealing jobs from the local citizens.  The Editor of the local newspaper, now actively arguing against Syrians was actively arguing against the Vietnamese.  There will always be “The Other”.  I guess we forget that there was a time when “The Other” was us.