Send us your Letters to the Editor
Please submit your Letters to the Editor by noon Thursday of each week, via e-mail, at letters@ashevilledailyplanet.com, or fax to 252-6567, or mail c/o The Daily Planet, P.O. Box 8490, Asheville, N.C. 28814-8490. Submissions will be accepted and printed at the discretion of the editor, space permitting. To place an ad online or in print, call 252-6565.
|
Friday, 09 December 2005 08:17 |
Our society evidently has its own built-in machinery to degrade itself ?? ?®getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.?∆ But it entirely depends on our cooperation.
The process of dehumanization is a complicated one, but now we have some ingredients to make things go much faster, e.g. the so-called entertainment industry, movies, TV, some of what??s termed music, computer games, gambling ?? all aiding and abetting our busy human desire to reach for the bottom.
To hasten the process is the growing wave that has always been around, but now has become a ?®respectable?∆ movement: the anti-immigration movement. Here are slogans as old as mankind: ?®Go back to where you came from?∆ and other deep thoughts. But my current concern is for people of Hispanic blood.
We allege that immigrants take jobs away from ?®good Americans,?∆ overload the welfare system and the schools, cause increases in crime or any other social ill you care to name. A small part of all these claims are true, but I have worked side-by-side with Hispanic people, almost entirely Mexican, and I object to some of the criticism they are receiving. My first work with Mexican people was with two different groups in the summer of 1952. I have since worked with them off-and-on over the years and have traveled on brief trips into Mexico in the late 1950s.
For one thing, there are fewer ethnic groups in our country who work
harder. As a kid, I was in the stoop labor force when apple-picking
time was in, ?®picking up drops,?∆ and I found it a torturous way to make
pocket money. Yet, I have seen men and some women ?®braceros?∆ in
100-degree heat in South Texas picking bell peppers or greenpack
tomatoes, with jackets on because they feared their spare clothes would
be stolen. All day long, in the broiling sun, doing work no ?®real
American?∆ would do.
If we denigrate all the many kinds of work they do, we are minimizing
the simple value of work. Where shall we draw the line? The work of Key
Lay or other corporate greedheads is ?®good,?∆ but lowly cleaning,
picking our crops and digging ditches is not ?®real work.?∆ We have lost
our humanity if that??s what we believe.
At that time (1958), their living accommodations, ?®bracero sheds,?∆ were
sub-human: limited washing-up facilities, sleeping the way people who
made the Bataan march were housed.
I have rarely encountered a Mexican in our country with an ?®attitude.?∆ Ordinarily, I have found them friendly,
amiable, patient and always willing to work, without grumbling, and
ready to be of help if they can. They are usually cleaner than some of
our local young people. I think I have more recently noted a tendency
toward suspicion and wary encounters among Latinos, probably because of
the heightened bad publicity.
So while we are quite prepared to minimize the value of hard work,
dedicated work, we are also busy attacking other human beings who have
not actually harmed us in any way, nor taken from us ?? but only
contributed, in most cases.
Drowning at the moment in dehumanizing forces of every conceivable
commercial interest, we are quite willing and happy to slander an
entire group of people if our politicians and TV bloviators tell us to.
As my dad used to tell us, ?®We don??t know when we??re well off.?∆
ALLEN THOMAS
Asheville
|
|
|
|
Error: Any articles to show
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
