Fear and Loving in San Francisco
Lo, a true journal entry.
Here’s what I know: there’s a lot of white folks out there, anglos, born in this country, second or third or fourth or fifth or sixth or seventh generation immigrants from some European country that wouldn’t have their kin, for whatever reason, not my business, who now live in California and, for reasons that are as simple and as complicated as the burning of books and the need for fences, these good folk do hate, or fear, or fear and hate, the Mexicans who live in California, legally, illegally, for one or two or three or four or five or six or seven generations. Because these are poor people, these hated illegals, these feared legals, these Mexicans, and the poor have never more than a single friend on this earth for every 40 enemies. Because the poverty is undeniable and the poverty is significant and the poverty is serious, though it is no different than any other poverty that has been before, no different from the White poverty, the Anglo poverty, the Black poverty, the Indian poverty, the poverty of Jesus Christ born in a manger, a homeless child in an occuppied land. That poverty is all one and the same.
So these kind good neighbors, these anglos who send out such distress signals as Save our State and, now, driver’s licenses doctored to show caricatures of a mexican man so heartbreakingly sad in its fearful ignorance as to render its intended political barb a mere prick compared to the howling pain it betrays in its author’s handiwork, these kind good neighbors whose brightest children I could strip bare in any intellectual contest, in their one and only language, the New World English of Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Flannery O’Connor and F. Scott Fitzgerald, of Malcolm X and Abraham Lincoln, these same brethern of mine must now vote, for a governor and, in San Francisco, for a mayor. For which they are presented with two candidates of the very same stock that is, now and again, so dearly despised and unknown. And whereas one of these, a candidate for governor, has little to offer, to anyone, let alone the downtrodden, the other, for mayor, is a philosophical rationalist, with a heart of gold and more in his brain than straw polls.
And so, as I rest my head to sleep for another day of what really only ever feels like chipping away at my own tombstone, with, recently, the radical optimism of St. Augustine keeping me sane (writing in his Confessions that if God is everywhere then he must, also, be in hell), I will hope that the THEM that is us, articulate, educated, middle class, rational, just and compassionate, will eventually outnumber the US that is them — afraid, vindictive and sad.
legal, illegal: From the vaults of LexisNexis: a 1994 Los Angeles Times poll found that 69% of Californians thought illegal immigration to be “a major problem” while 70% reported it was difficult to “tell the difference between illegal and legal immigrants.” Though, I would imagine, it’s always easier to tell apart the good hispanics from the bad ones.