Democracy for Vancouver

Rosemary My Ass

I got one of those irritating mega-forwarded Emails from an Uncle who has moved to SoCal:

My wife, Rosemary, wrote a wonderful letter to the editor of the Orange County Register which, of course, was not printed. So, I decided to “print” it myself by sending it out on the Internet. Pass it along if you feel so inclined. Dave LaBonte (signed)

Written in response to a series of letters to the editor in the Orange County Register:

Dear Editor:
So many letter writers have based their arguments on how this land is made up of immigrants. Ernie Lujan for one, suggests we should tear down the Statute of Liberty because the people now in question aren’t being treated the same as those who passed through Ellis Island and other ports of entry.

Maybe we should turn to our history books and point out to people like Mr. Lujan why today’s American is not willing to accept this new kind of immigrant any longer.

And yadda yadda yadda…
…It goes on to say that today’s immigrant (read: Brown and from the South) is an ungrateful lout, waving a Mexican flag and a copy of Das Kapital and not too infrequently squirting out little bambinos…
…I’ll just link to it here, as I Googled it and found it everywhere for you to read.
I’ll wait right here.
But I wasn’t content to simply flush it like I do most bad forwards (sorry, Mom!).
Instead, I added my contribution and sent it out to everyone in the CC field:

…Except that a lot of the sentiments portrayed in this letter towards our ‘new immigrants‘ aren’t particularly new or unique. Over the last century and a half, a lot of immigrants came here and attempted to hang on to some aspect of their national or ethnic identity, only to face hostility, violence or high-pitched political rhetoric. A lot of historical text (especially culturally and politically homogenized school textbooks) have sanitized elements like that, giving lie to the romanticized vision that the melting pot process in ‘the good old days’ was painless and hatred-free. The sentiment conveyed towards Latinos isn’t much different than that directed towards the Irish in turn-of-the-last century Chicago, Boston, New York et. al.; “they’ll take our jobs, take over our neighborhoods, breed like rats and taint our otherwise untainted gene-pool, etc…”.
I think this issue - although fraught with many real problems - is mainly being exploited as a wedge to split the electorate in the 2006-2008 cycles.
With so many other problems facing this nation, why else would this one garner so much corporate news time and so many newspaper column-inches?
I think because its element of xenophobia is successful at keeping people alarmed and agitated.
And I hang around a fairly ‘liberal’ and ‘multi-cultural’ (the horror!) circle, and have yet to hear someone suggest we demolish the Statue of Liberty, burn a flag, crush fluffy kittens in a hydraulic press, or whatever it is that Fox News says we want to do.
Wake up America, the barbarians aren’t at our gates, they’re tending the gates.

All this set off a flurry of Emails from some of the CC’ees.
My Uncle responded rather indignantly, saying that he only forwarded it because he had issues with illegal immigrants and not legitimate ones and also said I would have a different perspective had I lived in Southern California. He mainly forwarded it as per the message’s request.
But I think that’s what we have to do when someone says or writes (or echoes via Email) something stupid, we have to confront it and set them straight, if possible.
Please, if you receive this Email, add your two cents worth.
It’ll make you feel a lot better than if you didn’t