United We Stand

Teacher appreciation week was celebrated in my son's school this week and today(Friday) was the grand finale-a pot luck lunch organized by the parents. Since it was Cinco de Mayo,we went all Mexican and had a Taco bar-tortillas, beef and chicken fillings and all the fixings.Cheese,lettuce,salsa,sour cream,beans.And for dessert,a Tres Leches cake.
We used Signup Genius to keep all the parents in the loop and keep track of who was bringing in what.
The only issue we had was getting people to volunteer to set up and take down stuff. But I managed to talk a couple of parents who also happen to be my friends into helping out.
We met at school, helped set the feast out and were generally shooting the breeze when I noticed a very peculiar thing-we were all probably naturalized american citizens, but had all been born elsewhere-Vietnam(but Chinese),India and Bangladesh.Our religions varied too-Catholic, Hindu and gasp!Muslim(a headscarf wearing Muslim to top it off!)
There we stood, our children our commonality and it struck me-at that instant, all that we thought about was if the chicken and beef were warm enough in the stockpots  and if the lettuce and cheese wouldn't become soggy over time. No discomfort about each other, our ethnicity, our religious beliefs. No thought of where the country was heading or how diverse we were but how mundane that diversity needed to be. But there it was-a religion that is supposedly evil, a country which supposedly steals our jobs and a country that supposedly steals our economic superiority.
And there we were, four mothers who were united in our gratitude for the teachers who were shaping our children, the future of America.
We live in a progressive state where no one would bat an eye seeing the four of us together.But we do hear  about sporadic incidents here and there and wonder when the vitriol might hit us.
I watched this African American comedian named Kamau Bell attend a white supremacist convention( I know, weird!) and talk to the top honcho there.It was with growing apprehension that I watched the guy insist on 'European Culture' and how that is what brought America to where it it-like all the other ethnicities are worthless and have not contributed anything to the cause.Even if one concedes that it is true, take the blame too then-what was done to the native americans -the systematic decimation of an entire continent's worth of people,their culture, their environment,their health,their self esteem.The Europeans-since he insists, are the ones who made America great(ahem...heard that phrase before?)-should take the blame in its entirety too.No other ethnicities had a hand in that.
To make America great again( I know,I know), he insists,there needs to be self-deportation.Bell asks him how that would be achieved and he brought the wall, the promised wall, now a glorified fence,which Spicer insists , IS a wall, up and said that would keep them in and 'others' out.
But what about people like us? If illegal immigration is a problem, and I completely agree on that one, how about everyone who came here, say, in the last century, people from Asia (broad brush,but true), who have contributed enormously to the technological boom that America experienced and is still experiencing? What is to be done with us?Does he even understand the ramifications of the kind of ethnic cleansing(that is what this is, right?) he is ranting about?
The effect would be catastrophic.Watch Michio Kaku on Youtube discuss the H1B. Enough said. I will concede that it has been widely exploited, but the purpose is still justified.
When you have the clueless person at the white House fanning the flames, anything seems possible.And that thought is scary. Legitimizing such hatred is very dangerous.It happened once last century and we know the impact that has had on the world.
If anything, a more streamlined immigration system is absolutely essential.But this administration lurches from one policy to another like a bar hopping drunk and expecting anything cohesive from them is unfair to them and what it seems they are capable of. There seems to be no voice of reason in the entire administration, or those voices seem to be drowned out in the general commotion that symbolises it.But in that melee, people like the white supremacist gain momentum and followers and sometimes the damage cannot be walked back.
But through this all I still have hope that such lunacy will never fly here. After all Hillary did win the popular vote-by sheer numbers, there are more sane people out there than one thinks.
Let's hope then-hope and change-worked out well.Hopefully will come around once again.