Immigrants Make America Great!

We went to the zoo yesterday.  The weather was beautiful:  blue sky, not too hot, not humid.  A gorgeous summer day.  We decided to take the metro in so D could ride on it.  He loves trains and riding on the metro.  But apparently a lot of other people had this same idea, to ride the metro and go to the zoo.  We saw way more people than animals.  I forgot that I don't like going to the zoo in the summer for this very reason.  I hadn't gone anyway in six years, I think. 

Anyway, the people visiting the Washington DC zoo are of every stripe and color.  You can hear people speaking any kind of language, English (with Australian accents - we overheard), Spanish, Hindi, German and all sorts of others.  Skin tone ranged from the very darkest to pale with white-blond hair and every shade in between.  I even saw three or four interracial couples. And everybody was there with their kids, their buddies, their significant other, or with grandma pushing her in a wheelchair, all trying to get a good look at an animal or two.  I saw a couple of people wearing the above t-shirt. 

The rise of anti-immigration, racism and antisemitism is so anti-American.  We really are a nation of immigrants.  The important thing to be an American is to uphold the Constitution.  That's what counts.  We have a terrible legacy of racism against African-Americans, but we also have a legacy of abolition and civil rights.  And the second legacy is more reflective of our noble national goals than the first.  Antisemitism has always been around but there is a reason why there are more Jews in the USA than anywhere else.  Why they have been able to flourish here. 

This whole border thing has been whipped up for political gain.  The very wealthy, like Trump who have taken advantage of immigrants from the south of the border.  We've been so bad at managing all this because corporate american ran on cheap immigrant labor.  They work in slaughterhouses, pick our lettuce, dig our ditches, mow our lawns, clean our houses and wash the dishes you eat from at restaurants.    Big industrial farms use illegal immigrants to get around farm worker unions.  The very industry that Donald Trump represents is one of the worst exploiters.  What a blustering hypocrite he is!   People can get really worked up about race, as we know from history.  Think of Rwanda where the Dutch colonialists literally made up the two races of Tutsi and Hutu that didn't exist before they entered the picture.  That hatred was whipped up over the air by hate talk radio. 

I am not for open borders, actually.  I do think governments need to know where their authority ends.  And we are living in an age of illegal drug cartels, international gangs and terrorism.  We need a competent organization that works to keep us safe and also has compassion on those who seek refuge here.  Who realizes that human beings are actually what make up a country. They are our greatest resource and treasure. 

Poor J and S have twice now had to rent a sailboat to a well known white supremacist who lives in our area.  J didn't recognize him but S has a morbid interest in the issue and recognized him from some youtube video.  So my two very Jewish looking boys had to rent this sailboat to this clown.  The funny thing is S was so rattled that he forgot to warn him of where the shallows were.  The guy and his friends got stuck in the mud and then my half Jewish sons had to go out and rescue the a**hole.  LOL.