I should've gone on strike today (well, yesterday). Not so much out of support of immigrant rights- which I do believe in, on a human level, but a brief comment on that later- but just because it was May Day, the world's Labor Day and a memorial day dedicated to the Haymarket anarchists. Instead, I compromised my deep-seated, if often poorly expressed, belief in the solidarity of regular folks, for the sake of a fucking paycheck. Way to go, self.
I was talking to my pops about the recent spike in immigration debates, and I said that one of the unspoken reasons for alarm among American citizens is the fact that within a few decades, the majority of the United States won't be white. Pops agreed, although he didn't view my statement the same way I did.
The way I see it, an America wherein white folks don't constitute a majority of the population is an America where there may very well be a greater potential for change than exists now. I could be wrong, of course, or right in the wrong way, i.e. change definitely occurs, but for the worse, due either to immigrants bringing their own political practices with them (possible) or a backlash from "real" Americans against the encroachment of "foreigners" (more likely). Whatever the case, the importation of foreign political/social models can't be more detrimental to the US than the ones that were brought over by Europeans, such as the Protestant work ethic and racial supremacy (and the children of such an unholy union: Manifest Destiny and American pseudo-colonialism carried out via capitalism).
That said, I'm not going to defend bullshit cultural mores and customs simply because they're non-Western or non-white. The "family values" lauded by American conservatives are much stronger elsewhere in the world, and often to the detriment of those directly involved. I'm too fond of personal freedom, wu-wei, and self-realization to advocate, say, Hispanic or Chinese filial piety over the well-being of the individual. I've seen first hand what can happen to folks who grow up in households run by patriarchs/matriarchs, and while I'm all for respecting one's elders, buckling under pressure exerted by one's family- or blindly rebelling against it- does no favors to anyone. The same goes for devotion to nationality, race, or the state. I'm proud to be a Texan, but I'll be damned if I'm gonna put my admiration of the Lone Star before human decency.
So, yeah, immigration. I'm all for it. But I'm far more in favor of people taking off the blinders of church, state, race, and nationality and becoming the human beings they should be. This is where a Kierkegaard quotation would be appropriate, but since the Magister was highly apolitical and preferred to focus on the relationship between God and the individual, I can't think of any. All I can do is mirror him in a secular way and say that everyone's relationship to a higher power, divine or otherwise, should be rooted first and foremost in doubt. Only then can we start to see where we really stand in the world; only then can we take the first steps towards changing ourselves and our surroundings.
De omnibus dubitandum est.
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