world traveller (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} jenkasjournal) wrote,@ 2007-06-13 00:42:00 |
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in portland, oregon -- immigration raids, equality and humanity
it is at times like these when i just feel so angry.....
seething seems like the right word for how i feel.
when immigrations officials in all their white trucks can just sweep into town and sweep up......
sweep up families, mothers and fathers and sons, breaking them apart again, turning their lives upside down...
and for what?
so that bush can say he's being 'tough on illegal immigrants', by putting them in prison and deporting them back to what used to be home.....
but what used to be home is now subdivided and sold, and the land they once farmed is now turned into factories, or owned by the ones that own everything now, and put fences up to keep out the people who lived there before.
and in risking everything by crossing that deadly border, in order to send money back home, they have risked this possibility too......
that immigrations and customs enforcement would carry out the largest raid in recent oregon history, as they did today, and pull people out of their place of employment, in this case the del monte fruit company, pack them into buses and send them back down south.......
and the white people sit back and say, yes, well, but they _are_ undocumented, after all......
and that smugness is what makes me so angry -- how dare they sit back in their privilege and judge these southern brothers and sisters? how dare they? i seethe in my anger -- these european-americans whose grandparents or great grandparents arrived in this country just as 'undocumented' as these mexicans, salvadoreans and guatemalans of today. yet they would deign to judge their brethren, consider them 'illegal' just for being here -- how dare they?
what gives anyone the right to think that they are better than anyone else, for any reason, at any time? it's so wrong! yet, this is what makes this country tick -- this smug privilege, where people who were born into privilege refuse to see it as anything but an invisible birthright that just somehow 'is', and then judge the desperate actions of those who weren't born into such lucky circumstances. argh! I could just burst with this seething ...... seeing bush or anyone of his cadre just makes me boil -- that overprivileged caste from which they all come, blinding them to the reality of the millions -nay, billions - that they are stepping on to keep that privilege afloat.
i picture an image from the film qoyanisqaatsi, in which a group of copper miners in south america are carrying bag after bag of muddy, dripping copper up single-file muddy paths from the mines, carrying the bags on their heads, sweat mixing with mud and rain and copper until it is just a wash of brown.... and in the midst of it -- if you aren't watching closely, it is easy to miss, because the workers don't miss a beat -- there is a human body being carried up, above the heads of two workers, looking almost like just another bag of copper...a fellow worker, no doubt, who died or collapsed in the mines.....
how dare we give so little value to that man's life, or to the lives of any of those hardworking men, carrying loads like that day after day for years, so that we can have our copper faucets, copper pipes, copper pennies -- and that's just one tiny component of all the raw materials that make up this industrial society......
i know, if you read my journal, you've heard this before, but unless this society can realize the full connection to the sources of all of the things that we use in our lives, we are bound to be engaging in exploitation -- from the mining of the raw materials, to the manufacturing of the goods, to the shipping, buying, selling -- there is exploitation at every step of the process.
and all of those people being stepped on at every stage, they are all people, who deserve the same rights as every single one of us.
and it's not just the 200 women and men that got yanked out of portland, in front of all our eyes, on this day.......
the kids are still being killed there in palestine.....in iraq....afghanistan, in the congo, in sierra leone, in kashmir.....
and those kids are every one of them just as adorable and deserving of life as my own two sweet nieces.....
so how can so many americans just look down and see them as different and somehow less equal
it makes me so mad.
and then, when i called the reporter from the local newspaper who, just a few weeks ago, did an expose of this delmonte plant that was raided today .... this reporter who applied for a job there and worked side by side with these workers (not telling the bosses, of course, that she was a reporter)......who wrote up her scathing indictment of the factory's conditions along with stories of the people who worked there next to her but were afraid to speak out because they were without work documents.....
well, despite her bleary ramblings about her 'fellow workers' in the article she wrote, seemed entirely unconcerned when i reached her at her high-and-mighty reporter's desk after the raid. defensive and curt, there was no emotional connection to the workers she had written so highly about....no worry in her voice about how dear maria's five kids would be able to cope without their mom tonight, and every single night to come, or how jose's sick brother-in-law would pay his bills now that poor jose had been scooped up into immigration jail.....
no, this reporter who wrote with such feeling three weeks ago was now off on another tip, obviously considering herself and her work much more important than those workers she so gladly exploited for a scoop just a few weeks ago.
....and people wonder why i can't stand the corporate media.....
that kind of arrogant blundering -- without even an awareness or the tiniest bit of concern that the people she had worked next to were now shivering in cold concrete cells with no hope to be reunited with their families ever again in their lifetimes....
that's what really, really makes me seethe
at times like these.
it is at times like these when i just feel so angry.....
seething seems like the right word for how i feel.
when immigrations officials in all their white trucks can just sweep into town and sweep up......
sweep up families, mothers and fathers and sons, breaking them apart again, turning their lives upside down...
and for what?
so that bush can say he's being 'tough on illegal immigrants', by putting them in prison and deporting them back to what used to be home.....
but what used to be home is now subdivided and sold, and the land they once farmed is now turned into factories, or owned by the ones that own everything now, and put fences up to keep out the people who lived there before.
and in risking everything by crossing that deadly border, in order to send money back home, they have risked this possibility too......
that immigrations and customs enforcement would carry out the largest raid in recent oregon history, as they did today, and pull people out of their place of employment, in this case the del monte fruit company, pack them into buses and send them back down south.......
and the white people sit back and say, yes, well, but they _are_ undocumented, after all......
and that smugness is what makes me so angry -- how dare they sit back in their privilege and judge these southern brothers and sisters? how dare they? i seethe in my anger -- these european-americans whose grandparents or great grandparents arrived in this country just as 'undocumented' as these mexicans, salvadoreans and guatemalans of today. yet they would deign to judge their brethren, consider them 'illegal' just for being here -- how dare they?
what gives anyone the right to think that they are better than anyone else, for any reason, at any time? it's so wrong! yet, this is what makes this country tick -- this smug privilege, where people who were born into privilege refuse to see it as anything but an invisible birthright that just somehow 'is', and then judge the desperate actions of those who weren't born into such lucky circumstances. argh! I could just burst with this seething ...... seeing bush or anyone of his cadre just makes me boil -- that overprivileged caste from which they all come, blinding them to the reality of the millions -nay, billions - that they are stepping on to keep that privilege afloat.
i picture an image from the film qoyanisqaatsi, in which a group of copper miners in south america are carrying bag after bag of muddy, dripping copper up single-file muddy paths from the mines, carrying the bags on their heads, sweat mixing with mud and rain and copper until it is just a wash of brown.... and in the midst of it -- if you aren't watching closely, it is easy to miss, because the workers don't miss a beat -- there is a human body being carried up, above the heads of two workers, looking almost like just another bag of copper...a fellow worker, no doubt, who died or collapsed in the mines.....
how dare we give so little value to that man's life, or to the lives of any of those hardworking men, carrying loads like that day after day for years, so that we can have our copper faucets, copper pipes, copper pennies -- and that's just one tiny component of all the raw materials that make up this industrial society......
i know, if you read my journal, you've heard this before, but unless this society can realize the full connection to the sources of all of the things that we use in our lives, we are bound to be engaging in exploitation -- from the mining of the raw materials, to the manufacturing of the goods, to the shipping, buying, selling -- there is exploitation at every step of the process.
and all of those people being stepped on at every stage, they are all people, who deserve the same rights as every single one of us.
and it's not just the 200 women and men that got yanked out of portland, in front of all our eyes, on this day.......
the kids are still being killed there in palestine.....in iraq....afghanistan, in the congo, in sierra leone, in kashmir.....
and those kids are every one of them just as adorable and deserving of life as my own two sweet nieces.....
so how can so many americans just look down and see them as different and somehow less equal
it makes me so mad.
and then, when i called the reporter from the local newspaper who, just a few weeks ago, did an expose of this delmonte plant that was raided today .... this reporter who applied for a job there and worked side by side with these workers (not telling the bosses, of course, that she was a reporter)......who wrote up her scathing indictment of the factory's conditions along with stories of the people who worked there next to her but were afraid to speak out because they were without work documents.....
well, despite her bleary ramblings about her 'fellow workers' in the article she wrote, seemed entirely unconcerned when i reached her at her high-and-mighty reporter's desk after the raid. defensive and curt, there was no emotional connection to the workers she had written so highly about....no worry in her voice about how dear maria's five kids would be able to cope without their mom tonight, and every single night to come, or how jose's sick brother-in-law would pay his bills now that poor jose had been scooped up into immigration jail.....
no, this reporter who wrote with such feeling three weeks ago was now off on another tip, obviously considering herself and her work much more important than those workers she so gladly exploited for a scoop just a few weeks ago.
....and people wonder why i can't stand the corporate media.....
that kind of arrogant blundering -- without even an awareness or the tiniest bit of concern that the people she had worked next to were now shivering in cold concrete cells with no hope to be reunited with their families ever again in their lifetimes....
that's what really, really makes me seethe
at times like these.
