"People see their lies and we will rise
Because you might stop a single man
But you can't stop the tide."
The Undercover Hippy, 2014
Water seeks its own level.
There is a notion in physics, biology, finance, history, literature, and religion that there are great and inevitable forces which determine the course of everything, from rivers to the destiny of nations and souls.
There are equilibria at work. Brownian motion keeps molecules of air in front of our noses, because the molecules move to where there is room, from higher pressure to lower pressure. We count on that.
Gravity persists, and humans can build a bridge using arches because we don't defy gravity. We work with it. Sometimes we resist the inevitable. At some point the Mississippi will find its new, shorter and steeper path to the Gulf and New Orleans and Baton Rouge will be left high and dry.
Gravity persists, and humans can build a bridge using arches because we don't defy gravity. We work with it. Sometimes we resist the inevitable. At some point the Mississippi will find its new, shorter and steeper path to the Gulf and New Orleans and Baton Rouge will be left high and dry.
Humans migrate. They do it because they are curious and because they are escaping something worse in search of something better. It isn't a 21st century issue. It is the big story of humans and the constant story of America.
Rick Millward's guest post triggers the realization that we are treating immigration as an incident, as a current policy problem to address. Trump says we need a wall and Mexico--then the Pentagon--will pay for it.
There is a bigger picture way to perceive this. This is just a moment in the great tide of migration into what is now the United States, a process going on for 13,000 years, accelerated in the last 400 years, and it is as powerful and inevitable as the Mississippi and gravity. The only way to stop it is to make life in the United States more miserable than life everywhere else--a bad option.
There is a bigger picture way to perceive this. This is just a moment in the great tide of migration into what is now the United States, a process going on for 13,000 years, accelerated in the last 400 years, and it is as powerful and inevitable as the Mississippi and gravity. The only way to stop it is to make life in the United States more miserable than life everywhere else--a bad option.
Seen in the big picture of an America worth moving to, then the focus needs to change from barrier walls to the process of assimilation and integration. The way to see immigrants as assets is to make them assets.Are we building levies or are we building an arch?
As this blog reported yesterday, we have opportunity here. Employers need workers, now, and are eager to pay them. This is an irresistible force.
Rick Millward is a close observer of the American political landscape. He is also a music producer, singer, and songwriter, living in Medford, Oregon. He performs regularly at local wineries. He produces singer-songwriter showcases, with an upcoming one at RoxyAnn Winery in Medford at 3:00 p.m. on Sunday, October 27.
Guest Post by Rick Millward
"You're either runnin to somethin'
Or running from somethin'"
Song: Running like me, by Rick Millward
"We should stop calling it immigration and tell it like it is. This is migration: the movement of people to a new area or country in order to find work or better living conditions.
Humans are no different from any other species on the planet in this regard.
Immigration acknowledges this by creating a legal framework to accommodate migrants.
America was settled by Europeans who migrated for the same reasons; economic, religious, political, and that continues to this day. As long as there is some hope of a better life this society will attract those who have the courage and fortitude to make the journey.
We should welcome them. We need them. Instead Regressives would rather turn the country into a place no one would want to come. No migration problems in Russia, China and North Korea.
We should also acknowledge that Latin America, due in a large extent to climate change, is increasingly becoming uninhabitable which is one of the drivers of migration. It's not going to get any better until the industrialized World starts taking steps to decrease CO2 emissions. The United States could lead this effort to combat an existential threat that is far greater than migration."
Bernie Sanders says that he wants to hire America's most famous waitress, AOC, for his cabinet.
ReplyDeletePerhaps Bernie can also hire Ashland bar band performer Rick Millward to be his Director of Homeland Security?
After that, then Bernie can hire the Rogue Suspects to be his Secretary of Defense?
ReplyDeleteYou say "Humans migrate. It isn't a 21st century issue. It is the big story of humans and the constant story of America." Indeed, gentlemen.
Let us thank Messrs. Sage and Millward, for we finally may have a reply to Native Americans, the indigenous peoples of South America, aboriginals of Australia, tribes in the horn of Africa. The message is this: The great migration from Europe that destroyed their homelands and cultures was just nature taking its course. Those ethnic Caucasian movements over several hundred years should have been welcomed as benign natural phenomena. Those poor European whites were persecuted or miserable in their own homelands and so say Sage and Millward had a human right to which indigenous laws and autonomy had to yield. Resist and you are a deplorable the refrain now goes. Perhaps. But we died in boats crossing the Atlantic and Pacific in search of better lives, many of us indentured for the price of that squalid passage below deck.
Do you now posthumously celebrate our shipwrecked bodies washed ashore? Condemn now the deplorable native peoples who murdered our women and children as we peaceably pushed westward from St. Louis and Melbourne, southward toward our small enclave at Capetown, into the plains and savannas on foot or on mules. Like the central Americans and sub Saharan African families of today, we had scarcely more than the clothes on our backs. But it was better than the oppression of monarchs, cruelty of ecclesiastical overlords, debtor prisons and servitude back home in Europe where only wealth and privilege mattered. We sought asylum.
We bargained with bobbles and beads, shared the harvest and language, traveled as families and clans. We had no military, that came only later after these indigenous grew resentful of our numbers and showed savagery and slaughter. Thou must not show resentment for the numbers of migrants, and fear that they will take over is not a legitimate refrain. Did we make mistakes in the aftermath of the atrocities visited upon us, yes to be sure. There was killing and savagery and nice people I suppose on both sides. But it is undisputed that on these great and barren continents they scalped us, shot arrows into our flesh, inflicted crude tribal tortures, but we persevered in our right to migrate. And to this day many of them want us out still from the Amazon to the Adirondacks, from Cape Horn and to the vast Outback, they who rejected us and our human migration rights now demanding reparation and even retribution from us.
Yes, Messrs. Sage and Millward, it is time to recognize that our human rights as Europeans with white skin to a borderless world in Africa, South America, Australia and North America were violated by cruel indigenous people in the name of "spiritual homelands" and the "great gods in the sky", claiming these vast expanses as theirs alone. We demand justice.
How many crimes of movement and migration are hidden by the lack of written history. The native peoples of each continent ebbed, flowed, moved, conquered and were conquered. All of us--every human--is the descendant of survivors and murderers. None are innocent of that bloody history.
ReplyDeleteWho can cast the first stone? Who possesses land from the beginning of all time and owns it, fair and square, never taken by migration or displacement of some other group, and they of some group before them? In an early draft of my blog I attached a quotation about the migration of chimpanzees, who are territorial and stay put, except when caused to move by warfare or famine. The bloody history does not start with any identifiable people now, nor with even with humans, nor primates. Chimpanzees eat bush babies, tiny primates which share their habitat. Human ancestors encountered the Neanderthals. Apparently they interacted and some of Neanderthal DNA survives, but otherwise they disappeared. They probably did not volunteer to disappear.
That was then. We are alive. It is our turn. We can try to be good, be better, be just, be kind. It is an aspiration but it not our history. We--all of us--are the heirs to the benefits of unspeakable cruelty. Our ancestors survived.
There are not innocent
"All of us--every human--is the descendant of survivors and murderers. None are innocent of that bloody history." That,however, is not current or acceptable dogma, blame that is explicitly and racially ascribed is required of 2020 Democratic contenders. "There’s a story about immigration that can unite the country, not divide it further", Politico (Oct 20, 2019), but open borders isn't it; to the contrary, that still remains a key to Trump's re-election. As the Politico piece explains, the social science research shows Democrats lose "when immigration is framed as the decline of the white majority population to minority status instead of being a story of increasing diversity", and the "answer for Democrats is not to pretend that these demographic shifts are not happening". The identity politics and and political correctness push in replacing Columbus Day with "indigenous peoples day", for example, empirically delivers votes to Trump.
ReplyDeleteThe proposition that historical migration flows create a moral or political imperative to "welcome" however many millions of unvetted and uninvited migrants who can get here is not just political and anthropological nonsense, it leads to virulent populism like Trumpism.
Guy, possibly you are brand new to my blog. As recently as yesterday I wrote that Democrats need to have controlled borders, not open ones. Control is the price of having an immigration-positive policy. Open border talk and reality frightens people. People who stay unassimilated offend people. We need a policy of affirming immigration, enforcing immigration rules, and then having in place policies that make sure immigrants learn enough of the "American ways" that they don't trigger anti-immigrant activity. I am not trying to kill their culture; I am not trying to make everyone a white bread WASP. I am saying that some behaviors are both cultural and legal elements of American life: don't litter, don't drive drunk, make an effort to learn English, let your children learn English, don't remove your daughters' sex organs--stuff like that.
ReplyDeleteI have written repeatedly that open borders is a loser position. I am married to an immigrant. They are a good influence on America. They become part of America. We are a multi-ethnic nation. That is a situation that needs to be managed well, or else it triggers people who think Trump has the right idea.