DON'T WANNA BE AN AMERICAN IDIOT: MAY DAY IN THE USA
By Robert Klein Engler (05/03/06)
CHICAGO (1 May '06)--A river of protesters fills the street and overflows on to the sidewalk. They walk east towards the lake, and a rally in Grant Park. It is an overcast, gray afternoon in Chicago. Rain is on the way, but so far only drizzle dampens the air.
These protesters carry many American flags and many Mexican flags, too. There are also Polish flags and flags from third world nations. For a march that is supposed to be about civil rights, I see very few African-Americans here.
As this protest of thousands moves down Jackson Boulevard you can read the placards they carry. One hand written sign asks "Were the Pilgrims criminals because they wanted a better life?" Another placard declares, "No human being is illegal!" Yet another claims, "We are workers, not criminals."
I turn and walk down the street to follow the protest, then stop, stunned for a moment at what I just saw. We have imported the third world into our midst, I conclude. These marchers know nothing of our history or our ideals. They know only the freedom to make money but nothing about the Constitution. Our addiction to foreign labor is no different from our addiction to foreign oil. They both are entangling alliances we were warned against.
I suppose that in twenty-five years I will be dead. My students and the young people I know who walk through the city or ride the L listening to their iPods will inherit the country. If they do nothing to stem the tide of what I see today, then they will live in a country in chaos. There will be an estimated thirty-million more immigrants living here in twenty-five years. They will not be the salt of the earth, but an acid that dissolves the United States of America.
As we stand watching the parade, a boy suddenly jumps out of line and waves a blue flag at us. We excuse him because he is young and carried away with excitement. After he passes back into the mass surging forward, I imagine that other great wave of immigrants who came here last century. Did those immigrants seem so foreign to those watching then, as the ones here, seem now?
The philosopher Hegel says that history repeats itself. The first time is tragedy and the second time is comedy. There is nothing comic about this parade. Here is an example of how globalization threatens sovereignty. Is there room in America to digest this invasion, many wonder? The answer I see is a tragic answer.
One of the marchers says to me, "Just by being human you are legal." He waves in my face a yellow, printed sign supplied to the marchers by the Illinois Coalition for Human and Immigrant Rights. It took the money of wealthy supporters to print these signs. They look to me like the same signs the wealthy communists among us used to assuage their guilt when I was in college. The same slogans of that old politics is still broadcast amid backed up traffic and blaring horns.
If a world without borders is what these marchers want, then they also want an end to nations, and they want an end to the United States of America. A world without borders may be the way to some kind of dumb brotherhood imagined by a materialistic theology, but it is not the way to human or civil rights. As it stands now, it is this nation and its laws that guarantee human rights. Take away the ideals of the United States and its power, and we are left with the might of technology and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge--a place where men are only equal in poverty and death.
A few years ago I saw what happened at the college where I used to work when an all Latino administration was put in place for political reasons. The new administration brought with them resentment, terror and silence. Out of resentment they planned to get rid of whites and blacks and create an all Latino campus. Terror got them the power they wanted to make changes and silence hid their damage from the world. Their view of civil rights was to impose their own brand of segregation.
The college never recovered from the spite of those foolish administrators. I look at these marchers today and imagine they will bring the same resentment, terror and silence to our nation. Do we forget that fifty years of civil rights agitation has left Chicago and Omaha as segregated as ever? These marchers will be used to gain power by shortsighted politicians, then comes mediocrity and finally, bloodshed. Like the great Civil War our ancestors thought would never happen, no music on an iPod will dampen the violence to come.
I realize saying this changes nothing. Betrayal, like love, must be experienced before you know it is real. Maybe I should just head home, have a drink and go to bed. The question asked by Pontius Pilot rings in my memory above the chant of the crowd: "What is truth?"
I know from my reading that the wealthy transnationals and corporate elites will be immune from strife, at least in their own lifetime and on their equivalent of latifundias. They never liked the government of the people, by the people and for the people, anyway. When a man retires with 500 million dollars, what is more important to him, profits or patriotism?
What we see before us in the street today may be set in motion by the greed of the wealthy, but it is out of their hands, now, too. The golden politics of the baby-boomers from Woodstock is also gone gray. In the words of the poet Yeats, what we witness today could be the great beast grown up and slouching towards Bethlehem. If the issue of illegal immigration is decided, it will not be decided by the wealthy, but either by apathy, or by ordinary Americans who shop at Wal-Mart and eat at McDonald's.
As I walk towards the Metra Station for the train ride to my job in the suburbs, I hear the crowd chant, "SÃ, se puede. SÃ, se puede. Yes, you can!" Should we caution the generation behind us? You'd better take your earbuds out and listen to this.
Perhaps this chant is inspired by my Senator from Illinois. He addressed the marchers earlier. He knows that so many in his audience are in our country illegally. That violation of our laws seems not to bother him. "SÃ, se puede" can be turned into: "SÃ, se puede votar. Yes, you can vote!"
A young man walks by on his way to the train, too, earphones in place and blaring. Let Green Day sing all afternoon long, "Don't want to be an American idiot." It makes little difference. A politics of idiots prevails when there are open borders and closed minds.
The echo of "SÃ, se puede" follows us down the stairs to Union Station. Perhaps these sons of the shaking earth who march today will be legalized and vote tomorrow. Who will remember the blood glazed stairs that led to the alters of the Aztecs, then? It's May Day in the USA. The ground shifts beneath our feet. Wait and buy a ticket.
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