I attended the public hearing in Greenfield on the safe city ordinance on Monday night. I was born in Columbia County, upstate New York, the descendant of immigrants from the Netherlands, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Germany and France.
I had ancestors on both parents’ sides who came over on the Mayflower, and I had ancestors who walked across the border from Quebec to Vermont in the 1890s.
As a child, I wondered why my dad and his sisters hadn’t learned French, since my grandfather spoke both English and French. My grandparents raised their children Dutch Reformed, rather than Catholic, because there was a very active Klu Klux Klan in the region that burned crosses on Catholics’ lawns. Many in the Northeast states bordering Quebec actively hated French Canadians, who left Canada to find a better life and took low paying jobs that others in the U.S. did not want.
The perspective of the locals was that French Canadians drove wages down and took others’ jobs. Sound familiar?
My Irish great grandmother came to the U.S. as an orphaned adolescent in the 1880s and was trained by a German emigre as a tailor. She lived in their basement and was their unpaid apprentice. She ultimately married their son and set up a competing haberdashery. Her German in-laws despised her, because she was Irish. Again, the comparisons are rampant.
I see myself in the faces of immigrants.
My hope is that we can all see ourselves in the faces of our fellow humans who are here hoping for a better life, live their lives quietly and lawfully and provide for their children.
I support and applaud Council member Rudy Renaud for promoting Greenfield as a safe community for all of us.
Suzanne Patnaude
Greenfield