It is very difficult to admit you have been wrong about another person whose values you deplore, especially if that person is the president of the United States. I have been struggling with the reality that Donald Trump is absolutely correct about the immigrant issue. While I cannot agree with him on anything else, I have to concede that he is on the money about keeping certain immigrants out of America.
We would all be better off if Americans had learned this lesson long, long ago, like just under 400 years ago when the Mayflower first anchored off Cape Cod. Our original citizens should have stood firm in keeping immigrants out of our blessed country. None of the problems we are experiencing today would have happened if our natural citizens had kept those Pilgrims from landing at Plymouth Rock after they found no one home down on Cape Cod.
The Wampanoag Indians welcomed the white man with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end; that before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a free people.
History chronicles the broken promises made by the early settlers, most of those about land ownership. The Wampanoag culture understood that there were boundaries, but never before had to deal with fences and stone walls. Evidently, the white settlers needed to prove their worth by the amount of land that they owned. Ten years after the Plymouth Rock landing, the Puritans arrived and treated the Wampanoag even more harshly in attempting to convert the souls of these so-called “savages.” Although the Puritans were harsh to members of their own society, the unconverted Indians were hanged as quickly as any other “witch” was.
Having been stripped of their power, Indians could only stand by and watch while the white (mostly Protestant) men took their land and used it for their own personal gain. The Indians could not understand this; for them, land was survival, to farm, to hunt and to be respected. It was not to be abused ala mountain top removal coal mining, fracking, millions of miles of land covered by cement and asphalt and the destruction of virgin forests.
Fast forward to 2017; the conservative keepers of our country have not changed. Now they want to keep immigrants out by building a “yuge” wall separating Mexico from the United States and through immigration restrictions. Remember, there was a time when American political and business interests actually had people of color shipped to America not as immigrants, but as slaves. American prosperity leading up to the civil war was built upon the backs of free labor in the South while Northern businessmen amassed large fortunes from the textiles woven from these forced labor cotton crops.
Our current president and his Republican courtesans are no different than the Pilgrims and Puritans in their passion for real estate, evangelical evisceration of women’s rights and the nearly free labor available in China where the average manufacturing worker making iPhones, for example, receives a tenth of what his or her counterpart in the U.S. receives.
Of course, had the United States had a strong anti-immigrant policy from the get go, the Donald and I, and nearly every single American, would be living in some other country. Our president’s father Fred, one of three German immigrant children, and my Dutch immigrant parents never would been permitted to set foot on American soil.
Nor would Emma Lazarus’ sonnet, “New Colossus,” which she wrote for a fundraiser auction to raise money for the pedestal upon which the Statue of Liberty now sits, have been written. The bronze plaque mounted inside the pedestal of the statue reads:
“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
John Bos lives in Shelburne Falls and invites comments and dialogue at john01370@gmail.com.