The Grand Old Daily Bee

Hello everyone!

Sometimes I waste time. I meant to use my lunch break as an opportunity to get caught up on my readings for class, but that didn't happen. Instead, I got sucked into reading the online version of the Bonner County Daily Bee.

For those of you who don't know, this is the local newspaper for a town in Idaho called Sandpoint, which is where I lived for almost eight years before moving to Oregon. It's where I met Cathy and many of the close friends that I've had for years. It's also where my parents, grandma, and my sister and her family live, as well as where Cathy's parents live. So basically, although I wasn't born there and never went to school there as a kid, I pretty much consider it my hometown.

But there's a sort of strange ideology there, and I'm going to try to describe it as best as I can. It's a sort of "libertarian-isolationist" ideology. The area is overwhelmingly white and Christian, like most rural areas. But the people there are generally really big on privacy, (or at least used to be) which is how the Aryan Nation asshats ended up there for so long. As long as they stayed in their remote compound, kept to themselves, and didn't harass anyone, most of the locals didn't care.

Now that's fine if you just wanted to live in a cabin in the woods and grow pot (which a lot of people did, and I'm sure still do). But because the area is somewhat geographically isolated, and I'd add because there were no colleges there (the main reason I moved to Oregon in the first place), racism among the locals developed differently. In fact, I wouldn't even call it racism, but more like xenophobia. In places like California, white racists tend to look at poor people of color and think there is something inherently wrong with them, whereas there really are hardly any people of color in Idaho, and so the ones who aren't racists that moved up from California are simply xenophobes. They like North Idaho the way it is, and anyone different who shows up is trying to change their home. For this reason, many locals hate rich tourists or transplants, Californians in particular, or any other outsiders. A person of color is clearly an outsider since there are hardly any who live there. Apart from a few exceptions, the only time North Idahoans see people of color is when they watch TV. But they hear horror stories about them from the transplants.

The point to all this is that this attitude often shows up in the newspaper under the letters to the editor. In the online version, there's a space at the end of the letter to leave comments. Sometimes I comment, and sometimes I don't. Today's paper featured a letter that was so ridiculously racist, I had to comment. However, my comment included a pejorative term (only because it was part of an official US policy name), so who knows if they'll publish my comment. Anyway, here's the text of the letter followed by my comments:

Illegal immigration has tremendous cost
Posted: Thursday, Apr 24, 2008 - 09:17:05 am PDT


This is in response to March 18 letter on immigration.
Dear liberals (not the middle-of-the-road Democrats); the subject is illegal immigration:

What is it that you don’t understand about the word “illegal?” I agree with the person who said go to Los Angeles, Arizona, Texas and other states that are suffering from the burden of illegal immigrants.

Would someone tackle that single question with honesty. Don’t put a spin on it; our society is going to crumble under the huge negative impact of illegals.

These immigrants are certainly voting (illegally) Democratic so they can get all the free health, schools, jobs, bringing us down to their level — a third world country. Our history years ago would only let in immigrants that would bring something worthwhile; they were educated or trained to work in our society.

Long gone are the days when we can allow all of the worlds poor into the US. We are running out of resources for our own children.

Why don’t you read what you write, then actually think about what your saying! Rome fell and so can we. My guess is those who really think that it is a good idea to allow illegals into the U.S. also have an agenda of their own; me me me maybe?

I’m disappointed in some of my fellow Americans, you certainly have not traveled to the other countries that are trying so badly to get in the U.S. We can’t bring all those poor people into our country. What do you want for your own children; poverty? These are sad times and it is because of the very left liberals not the middle-of-the-road Democrats who are clueless and dangerous to the U.S. By the way, right wing conservatives are no better than you lefties! Do you really want America to be a third world country?

CAROL ALBANESE

Priest River

My response:

This country's immigration history has most certainly not been about "immigrants that would bring something worthwhile." On the contrary, it has been a series of some of the most blatantly racist policies in our country's history of blatantly racist policies. Look up the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, The Immigration Act of 1924 and the National Origins Formula, and Operation Wetback (yes, they actually called it that) just for starters.

Once you learn about our history of racist immigration policies, you can move on to our history of exploitation of people in poor countries, particularly in Latin America. You should study NAFTA and the effects of American subsidized corn and how it devastated Mexico's agriculture industry. Then you can read about the American-owned Maquiladora factories that opened in the border towns and how many of the millions of Mexican people who moved there for jobs and suddenly found themselves out of work when China was able to do it cheaper. You can research about the indigenous Mexican people who were kicked off their farm lands by American corporations because they didn't have "legal documentation" that they owned it, despite the fact that their ancestors lived there for thousands of years. I'm sure you could no doubt find hundreds of other examples of American officials and businesses exploiting Mexicans and other Latin Americans and/or meddling with Latin American governments, including the CIA overthrowing or trying to overthrow democratically-elected regimes simply because they won't do business with American corporations.

Or you could just ignore all this and continue to foolishly blame immigrants for all your problems. After all, victims are much easier to blame than the perpetrators, especially if blaming the perpetrators involves looking in the mirror.

It's easy to talk about how aghast you are that someone would break a law when that law benefits you and punishes them, when that law provides you rights and opportunities but not them, and the only difference between you and them is that you were lucky enough to be born on this side of the border and they were unlucky enough to be born on that side.

I'm sure that posting this comment won't change anyone's mind, but at least they can't keep falling back on ignorance as an excuse. Still, it really frustrates me when people measure others based on themselves while completely ignoring how much of an advantage they have.

Unfortunately, I just put myself at a disadvantage by doing all this because I'm still behind on my readings for school. I better get to it.

Rob