I received the item below as an e-mail forward. While I don’t generally do current-events commentary, this one struck a nerve.
Let's Say I Break Into Your HouseRecently large demonstrations have taken place across the country protesting the fact that Congress is finally addressing the issue of illegal immigration.Certain people are angry that the US might protect its own borders, might make it harder to sneak into this country and, once here, to stay indefinitely.Let me see if I correctly understand the thinking behind these protests.Let's say I break into your house. Let's say that when you discover me in your house, you insist that I leave.But I say, "I've made all the beds and washed the dishes and did the laundry and swept the floors; I've done all the things you don't like to do. I'm hard-working and honest (except for when I broke into your house).According to the protesters, not only must you let me stay, you must add me to your family's insurance plan, educate my kids, and provide other benefits to me and to my family (my husband will do your yard work because he too is hard-working and honest, except for that breaking in part).If you try to call the police or force me out, I will call my friends who will picket your house carrying signs that proclaim my right to be there.It's only fair, after all, because you have a nicer house than I do, and I'm just trying to better myself.And what a deal it is for me!! I live in your house, contributing only a fraction of the cost of my keep, and there is nothing you can do about it without being accused of selfishness, prejudice and being anti-housebreaker.Oh yeah, and I want you to learn my language so you can communicate with me.Why can't people see how ridiculous this is?! Only in America....if you agree, pass it on (in English).Jul’s Rebuttal:Like many hot-button issues, this one isn't as clear-cut as those whose feet are firmly planted on either side of the fence would have you believe.
It's fine and well to be pro-life... until your beautiful fifteen year-old sister tearfully blurts out that she tried to tell her boyfriend to stop, he just wouldn't listen, and now she's several weeks late. It's right and righteous to be anti-gun... until a group of drug-fueled teenagers breaks into your home at 3:00 AM, terrifies your children and steals your television for a day's worth of powdered gratification.
It's a-okay to favor capital punishment until you befriend a bright young black man who was in the wrong place at a catastrophically wrong time. Or until you're his mother.
It's also okay to oppose it, until you see local news coverage of a sex offender's arraignment, see that coarse, bloated face, the weak, wet mouth, the incessantly-fidgeting hands capable of snapping the swan-thin neck of a sobbing five year-old girl.
The human experience is all-too willing to thrust horrific, agonizing experiences at everyone who climbs aboard for the ride... which is to say all of us, from you and I, to Indians, to Asians, to Germans, to small, loincloth-clad men building fires with their bare hands in the stillness of the jungle, the same way we all punctuated our eked-out days so very long ago.
To reduce an issue involving another human's suffering to a black/white, yes/no, chicken-or-fish level of simplicity is to attempt to forcibly extract yourself from the vast, sticky web of emotion and experience which defines us as a species. It's not impossible (see: Ted Kaczynski, serial killers, the recent Paris Hilton-helmed battalion of "celebutantes"), but if you're that eager to abandon the fleeting traces of empathy and goodness which separate us from the groundhogs, then this strange, bipedal, toilet paper-employing state of being has been wasted on you. You might as well have lived your life blissfully non-self-aware, snuffling out nice crunchy bugs from the undergrowth with the rest of your pack.
Immigration is an issue which very directly involves the suffering of others. It's not easy for most people to see this; the average suburbanite's expose to immigration consists of glaring at the young men lounging in front of Tienda Mexicano, sipping Malta Goya and chattering in a language which is unintelligible but no doubt capable of expressing "Check out that angry-looking dork in the Land Rover."
For every nineteen year-old Oaxacan who border-hopped in order to suck a life of leisure from Lady Liberty's already-overburdened bosom (and I don't believe that all immigrants/illegals can be pigeonholed as such any more than suburbanites can be universally deemed Land Rover-leasing dorks), there is another, harsher and more complicated story of immigration.
As the analogy concept worked so well for the original "Housebreaking" piece, let's use it again here.
There are some new faces in the neighborhood. They are smaller, darker, less-scrubbed and more obscure than the other residents. They stick together fiercely, eating their own odiferous, unfamiliar foods, practicing their strange, incense-intensive variant of Christianity, yammering away in their own rapid-fire dialect. They are widely loathed for their sectarian ways, not to mention their willingness to debase themselves by accepting the toughest, dirtiest and most demeaning jobs in order to earn a living. Have they no pride? They are the butt of neighborhood derision and mockery, the target of local teenager's half-empty milkshake cups as they walk along the side of the highway, returning home from another day of shoveling shit in paradise.
One morning, when you walk into the den, rubbing sleep out of your eyes, one of them is sitting on your couch.
"EEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGH!" you comment, stumbling backwards and tripping over little Jeremy's Mighty Dump truck.
She appears to be in her thirties (she is actually much younger). She wears a button-down cotton dress with the distinctive, washed-'n-worn-several-million-times look of an item from Goodwill. Her deep brown eyes blaze with emotion - fear, defiance, pride, desperation, hope, pleading.
"Get out! Get out, get out, get OUT of here!" you shriek reflexively. She stares at you, comprehending the intent if not the actual words. Yet she makes no move to leave the couch.
"EDWARD, GET IN HERE!" you scream. Several minutes later, your boxer-clad husband appears by your side, bleary-eyed. He does a double-take when he sees your new houseguest. "What's going on here?" he asks, "Do you... KNOW this person?" "No, of course I don't!" you say, "She just... showed up, and now she won't leave!" Your visitor averts her eyes from the party hat-clad penguins protecting Edward's modesty, focusing fiercely on his face. "Ma'am," he says, "I don't want this to get ugly, but you're going to have to leave now." She doesn't respond.
By 10 o'clock AM, Edward has exhausted his entire repertoire of "COPS"-derived persuasion techniques (from, "Ma'am, please leave" all the way to, "Ma'am, I am TELLING YOU that you need to LEAVE RIGHT NOW"). Your dusky-skinned visitor has retreated to the kitchen (Edward's attempts to divert her path with his pale, lithe body both proving unsuccessful and temporarily diminishing your confidence in his masculinity). While Edward calls the local police chief, she prepares eggs. "No, don't... STOP TOUCHING OUR THINGS! Please… this is OUR house!" you plead as she silently peels the plastic from slices of American cheese.
"I am NOT. Eating. THAT," you declare when, after much cabinet-rummaging, she hands you a scratched Tupperware bowl filled with orange-streaked eggs. In a betrayal more onerous than impacted wisdom teeth or appendicitis, your body emphatically disagrees; your mouth waters and your stomach emits a hopeful rumble at the warm, rich smell wafting from the Tupperware. You refuse to look at it. Or at her. You turn back to Edward, who is replacing the cordless phone in its cradle with a curious, deflated look on his face.
"Yeah, that's... that's something," he says to himself as much as to you.
"What? What did the police say? Are they coming? They're coming, aren't they?" you say, knowing full well what the look on your husband’s face indicates.
"Um, I'm not... really sure how Donny KNEW this stuff, but...," Edward begins.
"What?", you say.
"Her name's Conchita. She's from ______."
You draw in your breath. "______? Really?" News footage of wild-eyed street gangs pouring forth into into the capital city like the Orcs from Mordor in Edward's beloved "Lord of the Rings" movies. Mothers clutching filthy children while being prodded by government rifles. Rioting and flame crushing endless miles of miserable, inhospitable little shacks.
"Got two kids," says Edward blankly, "Back with her mother in ______. Guess she's hoping to bring them all here, someday."
Two kids? That far away? You don't suppose she'll be making it back terribly often for weekend strolls in the park. Even if she could, you don't suppose downtown ______ is quite as hospitable as Buzz Aldrin Memorial Recreation Area.
You try to imagine being away from Tim and Jeremy indefinitely; you find that you can't. They're always just... there. “There” in the sweetest possible way, of course, even if their perpetual toy-strewing makes the house look like the aftermath of an earthquake at the Mattel factory. The longest you've been away from them was during a business trip to Toronto. You were gone for four days and spent each night alternating between getting pleasantly soused at the hotel bar and glumly watching HBO in your room, periodically remembering the way Jeremy's hair smelled or how Tim's fourth-grade art class project was a decoupage salute to Bonn Scott, original singer of AC/DC.
You can't really imagine a world without HBO and hotel bars, you realize with a slight prickle of shame.
"Let's go out on the deck and talk," you say. Conchita sits in the breakfast nook, happily reading the copy of Latino "People" which was delivered accidentally a few weeks ago. "¿Dónde Es El Bebé Suri?" asks the cover.
"What the HELL are we going to do?" asks Edward.
"She can't stay here," you blurt, and even before the words leave your mouth, you realize how awful they must sound. "We have our OWN lives, Edward... I'm so, so sorry she had to live in that awful place, and to leave her KIDS there, I can't even imagine... but even though that's a big problem, I'm sorry, but it's not OUR problem."
Edward stares at you bleakly. "Yeah, I know, I absolutely do," he says, "I just wish..."
You sit silently. You remember when your cousin Dawn's daughter Lily was going through a rough spell as a teenager, smoking pot, staying out all night, screaming that her mother and father were, "FUCKING FASCIST TOOLS OF OPPRESSION!" at family gatherings. Always a smart one, Lily.
After a particularly ugly battle with Dawn, Lily showed up on your doorstep one Saturday night, looking all of four years old even with purple glittery eyeshadow and a t-shirt bearing the cheery message "I AM THE GOD OF FUCK" ("Hell, I thought that was Ron Jeremy!" said Edward, his desperate attempt at counterculture credibility rewarded with an eye-roll and a scowl). She stayed on the sleeper sofa in your basement for six months, at first refusing to make eye contact or reciprocate Tim and Jeremy's hesitant hugs. In time (and when it became apparent that her hosts weren't the type to pronounce Nietzche as "Um, Nizz-itch?"), she lowered her armor plating enough to smile, occasionally vacuum and help Tim make a pentagram symbol out of Mega Blox.
You never grew close enough to Lily to assume that you'd played a pivotal role in her life (even after one giggly evening of sharing joints and backseat experiences on the deck). However, after moving back in with Dawn, she enrolled in hairdressing school, stopped decorating her room as though it were Anton LaVey's personal boudoir and decreased by 60-70% the number of screaming fights instigated with her mother. "I'm not gonna say she's a TOTALLY different kid," Dawn confided over Olive Garden white zin one day, "But I don't hafta fight the urge to KILL her every single day, so that's a start."
Did we make a difference, you wonder? Was our half-year of love and willingness to allow our children to be exposed to Marilyn Manson lyrics all that it took to shift Lily away from a slippery, dangerous path? Is it possible to alter someone's direction with a single soft tap on the shoulder, so long as there is sufficient kindness behind it?
You and Edward walk quietly over to the sliding glass back door. Conchita is eating maraschino cherries out of the jar, dripping red juice on the table, mopping it up with a napkin. The table will still be sticky. Although the plastic container of eggs still sits on the counter, the rest of the breakfast dishes have been washed and laid glistening on the countertop. "Guess she didn't know we had a dishwasher?" whispers Edward.
You think of how you're going to be late for work, how the kids are probably playing GameCube in the den even though they've been expressly forbidden from doing so in the morning. You think about soccer practice after work, about how the chicken in the fridge went bad so you'll probably be ordering a pizza for dinner.
You think about living in a society where you can not only purchase several pounds of choice segments of chicken for less than an hours' pay, but afford to let it rot.
You think of the laughable impossibility of harboring an uncommunicative illegal immigrant, the sitcom-ish quality of the situation as well as the ways in which it would wreack havoc on your already-overburdened lives. Edward always believed in buying the worst house in the best neighborhood, so you're living in a three-bedroom closet, tripping over the Mega Dump at every turn, waiting in line to pee.
What do you do?
What do you do?
Labels: Social Ishizzles, The Compleat Thumbscrew
