In our last post we talked about the fact that Democrats, and all progressives, have a record of producing many “firsts”. That is, because we include all kinds of minorities and marginalized people in our political party and decision making, we tend to have people who become the “first” at something: the first black/Indian female Vice President; the first openly transgender woman as assistant secretary of health; the first openly gay man who is secretary of transportation. And we are proud of those things.
The Republican party does not want, and therefore does not have, many such people. As a result there are too few of them (blacks, Muslims, Jews, Chinese, Shintoists, gays, Hungarians) and they enjoy too little respect and support among Republicans for them to make many “firsts” of any kind.
But, that’s okay with Republicans. Because they don’t like, they don’t trust, and they don’t want people or things that are different. And because immigrants are, by and large, the biggest cause of multiculturalism (and all things different) they are especially disliked.
No, they like a monoculture, not a multicultural, society. We should all be like everybody else. As Mr. Miyagi might say, “everybody same, same.” Indeed, Pompeo and friends would have everybody eating the same ham sandwiches on white bread with mayo and pickles and listening to the same Pat Boone records.
Right now the attention of the Democrats and the nation is focused on two big and historical events: the second impeachment of Donald Trump and the fight against the coronavirus. And these are going to suck up a lot of political oxygen for the time being.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-biden-immigration-idUSKBN29P12L
Joe Biden, fortunately, is committed enough to equality and fairness with immigrants that he has already taken the first steps in turning the country away from Trump’s (and Stephen Miller’s, and Fox News’) anti-immigrant policies. He has signed an executive order that opens a pathway to citizenship for undocumented people and that clears a the way for Dreamers (undocumented people brought to the United States as children) to immediately apply for green cards. He took action to preserve and fortify the DACA program and even moved to lift the ban on Muslim-majority and African people from entering the United States.
But it’s going to be a hard lift for Biden and the progressives. The Reactionary Republicans are going to fight back, with obstruction, with lies from Fox (Fake and Phony) News, reports of illegal immigrants murdering, raping and drug dealing, and with idiotic but seemingly historical or intellectual arguments for keeping immigrants out (except for possibly a few good looking eastern European models).
That brings us back to the anti-immigrant bigotry of Mike Pompeo, who was, shockingly, given the responsibility of helping to run our relations with foreign countries as Secretary of State.
For the record, here is the anti-immigrant slur that Pompeo tweeted just after we celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday and just the day before Trump slithered out of town:
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/pompeo-on-last-full-day-in-office-slams-multiculturalism-as-unamerican-1.9465031
“Woke-ism, multiculturalism, all the -isms —- they’re not who American is. They distort our glorious founding and what this country is all about. Our enemies stoke these divisions because they know they make us weaker.”
Foreign immigration into the U.S. is the main, powerful, driver of multiculturalism. I don’t know if Pompeo is exceptionally ignorant of American history, or whether he is lying. But he is completely wrong about this. Here a couple points to set him straight.
-Thanks to immigrants America has always been a country of many, many -isms.
At the very beginning of our history was the search for religious freedom. That’s what brought the Puritans and their faith of Puritanism to America. After them came others adhering to various types of Protestantism (Lutheranism, Calvinism, Episcopalianism). And for those who did not believe, as most others did, that God was the maker of the universe but did not actively intervene directly in the affairs of men, there was Deism (an -ism that was popular with our founding fathers).
Religion continued to add more -isms. Traversing the 19th and 20th centuries we have had Judaism, Denominationalism, Catholicism, Mormonism, Adventism, Pietism, Buddhism, Non Denominationalism, Hinduism and others.
Politically we have had secularism, anti-secularism, socialism, republicanism, conservatism, progressivism, libertarianism, feminism, radicalism.
There has never been a time in our history when we did not have some kind or another of religious, political or social -ism. And they all had the affect of making us more aware, or “woke” of others and increasing the amount of tolerance that we developed as a nation.
-When we treat people fairly and honestly the -isms create strength and unity, not divisions or weakness.
Contrary to what the Reactionary Conservatives like Pompeo say the many -isms of our diverse culture enrich and strengthen us way out of proportion to the trouble and pain they might cause. Once people have hope that the promise of America can be theirs, they do well by us.
Hyman Solomon, the Jewish financier from Poland, was certainly not like most White, European, Christian, men of his time. But that did not stop or dissuade him from negotiating loans from France on behalf of the American revolution. The Chinese immigrants, and their orientalism, laid a lot of track from west to east for us. And the Irish depended on their Catholicism and clericalism to lay a lot of track from east to west.
Navajo code talkers made sure the enemy could not break our codes in World War II and the Samuel Gompers’ efforts to develop trade unionism through collective bargaining greatly increased wages and improved safety for millions of American workers. We made many alliances during the second world war in order to defeat fascism. So World War II was not won by unilateralism but rather by multilateralism. And yes, feminism helped women to get equal pay for equal work, the chance to get credit in their own names, an end to discrimination in insurance and the chance to serve in the armed forces.
All in all, foreign immigrants and our various -isms have worked pretty well for us.
-Because we can tolerate differences and assimilate immigrants, America has reaped gigantic benefits.
It should be beyond doubt by even the rankest anti-immigrant, -isms hating bigot like Mike Pompeo and Stephen Miller, that both immigrants and different belief systems yield enormous benefits to America.
Here is my favorite example of how one person, from a very foreign world, brought tremendous change and benefit to not only to America but to the entire world.
It’s the example of Dr. Jonas Salk.
https://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/polio-vaccine-thanks-jonas-salk/
Jonas Salk was the child of immigrants. His mother’s family immigrated from Eastern Europe in the early part of the 20th century. His birth here was the result of chain migration - his uncles immigrated first and managed to bring over the rest of the family members, including Salk’s mother, Dora. And against some long odds Dora’s oldest son, Jonas, was the first man to develop a vaccine against polio.
How important was his vaccine against polio? If you are under the age of 65 you probably can’t begin to grasp what polio was or why a vaccine was so desperately needed. But you can get an idea from this real world incidence of polio’s affect on people and its deadliness.
And nothing seemed to be able to stop the virus from reemerging every summer and continuing to kill and cripple.
https://achievement.org/achiever/jonas-salk-m-d/
It was Jonas Salk, the son of an immigrant Jewish family, a man who believed in Judaism and intellectualism, who found the cure for polio. And when he started his mass vaccination in 1954 we were on our way to completely wiping out polio. Imagine that!
God bless the immigrants, God bless the -isms and to hell with the racism of the Reactionary Republicans.
Vote progressive, live progressive, prosper progressive.