Recently, I wrote about America’s love affair with guns. One argument that Second Amendment proponents use, to great effect, is that an armed citizenry prevents government tyranny.
Indeed, there are many Americans who believe that a “disarmed society is an obedient society…in which, at the extreme, people obey their own government’s orders to follow the line into the gas chambers.”
Well, that certainly is an unpleasant image.
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I once hurt someone’s feelings, and not via my usual method of making an ill-timed, biting joke. No, I disappointed my friend because I said that eradicating racism is impossible.
She is a hippie type who inexplicably thinks that someday humanity will get its act together and take a break from the self-slaughtering. But that will never happen — at least not completely, everywhere on the globe.
Well, there is one solution…
Just to be clear, nobody should yell “Nazi” at people unless there are, you know, actual Nazis present.
I make this clarification not just because it’s the truth, but because so many people have had their sensibilities offended during the arduous debate over immigration.
Judging from reader comments to several of my posts, it is not illegal immigrants and their supporters who have been slandered. No, this coalition of liberals and minimum-wage workers — outnumbered by at least two to one in many opinion polls — are the aggressors.
Yes, the “Nazi” label has apparently been tossed at people who support laws such as SB 1070. Now, even if you’re in a privileged position of economic power and numerical supremacy, and the person yelling it is near society’s bottom rung, that’s got to sting (although it would be nice to acknowledge that dynamic).
For the sake of argument, let’s call it even, and forget about all the racial slurs and threatening vitriol aimed at illegal immigrants. We’ll also let it go that much of people’s defensiveness (“I am not a fascist!”) is just the attempt to counter-attack uncomfortable accusations of racism.
It’s impossible to measure how many individuals on each side are acting like lunatics and to what degree. So let’s just call it unsightly all around.
However, I would ask that if you send me hyperbolic emails detailing crazed behavior by illegal immigrants, as one person did, that you at least keep it timely.
You see, I recently received a forward about the Montebello flag-raising incident. If you don’t recall, some Latino teenagers in California got out of hand during a demonstration. They raised the Mexican flag, and hung the American flag beneath it, upside-down.
It’s certainly a striking image. Perhaps that’s why it’s still flying around the internet as proof of a Latino insurrection, despite the fact that it happened in 2006.
Now, it would seem to me that if nothing more egregious than raising a flag has happened in the last four years, then the Hispanic overthrow of our government is not quite the threat the right wing is presenting.
At the risk of becoming defensive myself, I’d like to bring up an image from a demonstration that resonated with me. Granted, the protest was about healthcare, not immigration, but it at least occurred within the last year or so.
You may have seen this gentleman, and others like him. They believed it was a good idea to carry assault rifles to venues where President Obama was speaking.
The response from conservatives was praise and the usual pontificating about Second Amendment rights.
So if we’re keeping track: A bunch of unruly teenagers come up with a tacky way to protest, and it becomes a horrifying sign of revolution. However, grown men show up with firearms in a clear attempt to terrify their political foes, and it is a sign of patriotism.
The kids were disciplined for their idiotic prank. The guys with guns, however, went about their lives just fine, with the biggest burden probably the hassle of digging through the fan mail they received.
I could also point out that many of those teens have been told, sometimes overtly, that they are subhumans who have no rights. This is contrast to the adults with guns, who tend to be at the top of the American pecking order. They should also be – and let me phrase this delicately – old enough to know better.
So by all means, if the emotional response of teenagers is more of a threat to you than the aggressive tactics of adults, make your case. The odds are, however, that you will lose that competition.
In a recent post, I wrote about the inherent Latino-ness of California. In a different post, I wrote about the continuing saga of illegal immigration in Arizona. Now watch in amazement and wonder as I twist and meld those two disparate subjects into a wholly new post.
As I mentioned, the new archbishop of the Los Angeles diocese is Jose Gomez, who is in line to become the first Hispanic cardinal in the United States. The new archbishop has a more tolerant view of immigration than many of his Christian peers, which is not surprising in light of his Latino heritage. But it may intrigue some people that the outgoing archbishop, Cardinal Roger Mahony, is just as adamant in opposing the demonization of the undocumented.
Mahony recently compared Arizona’s anti-immigrant law to “German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques.” Mahony said that Arizona had created “the country’s most retrogressive, mean-spirited, and useless anti-immigrant law” that is based on “abhorrent tactics [used] over the decades with absolutely no positive effect.”
Mahony adds that the law features “totally flawed reasoning: that immigrants come to our country to rob, plunder, and consume public resources. That is not only false, the premise is nonsense.”
With their respective attitudes toward immigration, both Mahony and Gomez line up with their fellow Californians more than many social conservatives would like to admit.
For example, the LA Times recently released a poll about Proposition 187, that infamous piece of legislation that denied public services to illegal immigrants. The law passed in 1994 by a healthy margin.
However, the years have not been kind to the law. Now, more Californians oppose it then support it (by 47 percent to 45 percent). The LA Times attributes the change, in part, to the growing number of Latino voters, but adds that age plays an even bigger role.
“Californians aged 18 to 29 opposed this proposal by more than a 20-point margin, while voters 65 and over supported it by 12 points,” the survey said. This was “a much larger disparity than when the results were examined by racial or ethnic category,” adding that “voters under 45 joined Latino and Asian American respondents in answering that illegal immigrants represent a net benefit.”
Apparently, “young Californians [have] a much higher comfort level than their elders with those of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. In both cases, exposure has brought familiarity, which has in turn brought tolerance,” according to the LA Times.
Now, it’s easy to dismiss all of us here in California as new-age, touchy-feely liberals with bad morals and a shallow view of life. As a matter of fact, I know a few people like that.
However, it’s well known that California, along with New York, plays national trendsetter more than places like, say Utah or Kentucky do. The opinions about social issues that are formed here always have a strong impact on any national debate. Immigration is just the latest example.
In fact, one could argue that Arizona is simply following in California’s footsteps. The original hard-line approach to illegal immigration (the aforementioned Prop 187) is the legislative godfather to Arizona’s new law.
But if California is any guide, “Arizona’s fast-growing Latino population will eventually begin flexing its political muscle to force a more moderate course on immigration,” according to the LA Times. “Nearly half of all K-12 students and babies born in the state are Latino.”
So maybe, despite all the teeth-gnashing and screeching, Arizona and the rest of the nation will eventually adopt California’s social mores. Hopefully, they will do a better job on economic issues, but that’s a whole other story.
Yes, like sushi, yoga, solar power, and other California-born fads, perhaps acknowledging the humanity of immigrants will become the latest national trend.
And that would definitely not be gnarly.
