Allophile

Increasingly charged...

...like the air of an August afternoon in southern Arizona:
above the heat, the clouds build, filled
with the promise and threat of rain and lightning;
the sky's electric...
The national discourse/debate/hand-wringing/scape-goating/concern both sincere and xenophobic--
call it what you will--
all of it about immigration--
gets more and more charged, every day.

A new resident in this borderland, I read the local paper, watch the national news, scan headlines on the Internet...and I have the occasional enlightening/disturbing doughnut. What I mean is, during a recent stop at a doughnut-shop, I saw this flyer pasted onto the side of a newspaper dispenser:

Now, I am by no means an apologist for illegal immigration. But to put words in God's mouth, as if the Creator takes sides in 'The Tortilla curtain' debate?...Wow. Partisan presumption, all the way...

(...I've been sitting here for a few minutes now, wondering how to type something that won't be too vitriolic in my disdain for people who would come up with such a flyer...)

Alarming, this abundance of historical aliteracy --not illiteracy, but rather the willful constructing of a bubble of ignorance of time and place beyond one's current everyday existence. YES--border 'control' and illegal immigration is a problem...YES something should be done..YES the lack of humane consistency in immigration policy is absurd...

But...To frame the dilemma in a jingoistic 'God bless America but damn all those outside our borders?' To thumb one's nose at darker-skinned south-of-the-border desert-crossers, while sneering 'sucks to be you?' And to do that while invoking 'christianity?'

It makes me want to spit venom--venom not to harm, but venom that would inject into someone a socio-moral conscience capable of empathy, if even for only a week. Venom that would make them crack open a book, make the effort to know personally at least one person from 'the other side', to translate 'wetbacks' into 'human beings,' to understand clear and present background issues instead of resorting to kneejerk reactions...

Fear of drugs, fear of violence, fears of terrorism, not to mention linguistic chauvinism and blatant racism--such a virulent stew in which to try to cook up anything productive in this debate-on-immigration that grows tiresome but no less urgent.

'To the making of many books there is no end, and much devotion to them is wearisome,' penned the writer of Ecclesiastes...But--here's one (more) thing to read to get a bit more of an understanding of what's going on just south of the border: Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border by Luis Alberto Urrea. Here's a link to more information about it...

On a related but lighter note, in yesterday's paper, I saw this cartoon:

So much for that. Never in human history have languages respected borders. Neither have borders respected humans. There's the problem.

...

Evenings are beautiful here...after sunset, when a storm has washed away the afternoon heat, the desert looks tranquil, even the urban jungle that sprawls across it...