Sixty degrees headed for the mid-eighties, the morning after Nancy and I watched our granddaughters celebrate Independence Day with fireworks in the driveway and in the Cul de sac of the subdivision where our son and his family live.
I started the day reflecting on July 4 in Longmont deeply worried about the nation into which those girls will grow up. I was out and about quite a bit on Independence Day in this city where one in four people is Latino, beginning the long walk through his and the adjoining neighborhood, much of it along a shady sidewalk on a street called Mountain View.
Later I did a brief prowl in the business district, checked on a bookstore I like, visited a big strip mall, got a hot dog at Sam’s Club and lunched on a bowl of chili at Wendy’s.
Not once did any of the Latino people I mingled with, did business with, or bought food from offer to sell me any Fentanyl. I saw no tattoos signifying gang membership. None of them appeared to be former mental patients, killers, rapists or other criminals supposedly released from jails so they could “invade” our country and practice their hobbies on us.
All I saw were ordinary people, and I wondered how they feel in today’s American political climate that indiscriminately lumps them in with the few criminals who cross the border. Could I have been mistaken? Shouldn’t I realize that people such as them are lesser people in the eyes of the country’s leader who is advocating a form of ethnic cleansing?
I started wondering about those who subscribe to the idea that citizenship is arbitrary and can be taken away at the whim of a leader who acknowledges no limits on his authority, typified by obsessively targeting one man jailed and tortured in a strange land by mistake—his tortures described in contemporary news accounts—who, having finally been returned to this country is targeted again on suspicious charges that only now will involve due process denied him earlier and still denied to many others caught up in a cruel system.
It has become a country where its leader speaks with pride of a detention camp called “Alligator Alcatraz,” where five thousand people of Latin origin can be imprisoned without due process.
He thinks it is funny to say, “We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator, OK? If they escape prison, how to run away. Don’t run in a straight line…And you know what? Your chances go up about 1%.”
His press secretary amplified the tragic absurdity of the whole idea, saying, “When you have illegal murderers and rapists and heinous criminals in a detention facility surrounded by alligators, yes, I do think that’s a deterrent for them to try to escape.” Neither of them wants to address how they know all of these people are “illegal murderers and rapists and heinous criminals.” (Illegal murderers?)
The Republican Party in Florida adds an additional flair to “appalling” by selling Alligator Alcatraz merchandise. Imagine seeing a baby in an Alligator Alcatraz onesie. The Florida GOP will sell you one. They come in several colors and only cost twenty-five dollars.
Hilarious.
The President has caused some serious whiplash by calling for expulsion of migrant farm workers (without indicating how his zealous ICE agents will differentiate the legal ones from the illegal ones when they swoop down on agriculture facilities) then saying he’ll give them a pass, then his Secretary of Agriculture say there will “no amnesty” for those workers—-
—-and then Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins brushed aside industry concerns that mass deportations would have severe consequences on American farming by making the completely bonkers suggestion that 34-million able-bodied people on Medicaid could replace those migrant workers “quickly” because of the work requirements for Medicaid recipients in the Big Ugly Bill.
He also recently said he’s looking into taking over Washington, D. C. and New York. And his obsession with punishing Harvard University because it has resisted his intimidating demand to shape education in his image further confirms his limited toleration of “freedom.”
The idea that Trump would want to “take a look” at denaturalizing Elon Musk because Musk dared criticize his proposed big policy legislation, or that he would consider denaturalizing the legally-elected Democratic candidate for Mayor of New York on specious, if not spurious, reasons is an indication that this president is even more dangerous to all of us in one way or another.
Today’s children and grandchildren are going to inherit from this generation that which it refuses to reject. It will not be a good legacy that we give them.
I felt pretty good when I started that walk. By the end of the day, after watching innocent youngsters celebrate the founding of this now deeply-troubled country, I feared for them.
And I remembered that on that morning stroll, that I walked past a young brown girl sitting on a shady curb and talking to a friend, in Spanish, on her cell phone. A block later, I passed a house with a July 4th yard decoration.
God, Guns, and Trump.
A lady saw me take the picture and shouted out her window, “Happy July 4th.” I wished her the same as I continued the walk. And I wondered if she would have said the same thing to the brown girl I had seen a block away if she walked past that sign.
Independence Day isn’t as much fun as it should be anymore.
(photo credits: onesie—markayshop.com; Lake and Mountains—shutterstock; Mountain View and the yard decoration: Bob Priddy.)
Latino friends and culture are very much a part of my life since moving to Los Angeles from St. Louis nine years ago. After all, California was part of Mexico until 1848. We also have large Japanese, Chinese, Korean, African American populations in addition to us gringos. But we get along. The recent onslaught of ICE agents into our streets and businesses has disrupted daily life. The Latino maintenance worker (a US citizen) in our building told me he put an Apple Air Tag in his mother’s wallet “just in case.” The woman who sells me tamales at the farmer’s market hasn’t shown up in recent weeks. Her husband has been sitting in for her while she keeps a low profile. I ask about her well being so this past Saturday he handed me his phone so his wife and I could “FaceTime.” She was in the car with their two-year-old. They were so pleased someone asked about them. Life at three of my neighborhood restaurants has been disrupted by ICE on “fishing” expeditions; no warrants, just hard working brown people on the premises who make up almost half the LA population. Whites comprise 24.5%. LA has some problems, but hard working Latinos are not one of them