This is me at the immigration protest in Lafayette Park this afternoon:
Wow.
How exciting, how grand, how glorious it was to be there. It took several hours afterwards for the sense of triumph, of heroism, to sink in. This may be as close as most people can come to the feelings of the First Crusaders, victoriously capturing Jerusalem, or the Athenians at Marathon. Of course, the cause isn't won. But the feeling of solidarity, of unity in purpose, and of having captured, at least, the moral high ground, felt like victory.
For the past year I've been growing ever more disdainful of the Democratic ruling class and its desperate dash to rob future generations blind. But I've come to admire the Republicans for their steadfast defiance, and to look to the wise paranoia of the Tea Party as a source of hope. Logically, the Tea Party's libertarian streak should have made them as suspicious of the government hunting down immigrants as of the government forcing people to buy health care, and if it wasn't clear that this logic held, it did seem possible that good leaders could turn the Tea Party's enthusiasm in an immigration-friendly direction, or if not that, at least tolerate non-evil views and policies on immigration. But the Arizona law changed that. There was no time to wait for enlightened Republican leaders to shepherd the Tea Party in the right direction. Fascism was on the march, and Obama, exhibiting the same disdain for freedom that he exhibited in his health care reform and in his foreign policy, seemed ready to cave in to it.
I don't argue politics with people too often, but in a couple of conversations I have had, I've noticed that liberals' only move nowadays seems to be to change the subject to immigration. Health care reform is indefensible. It's too obvious that the whole sales pitch for it was a lie, that it will raise costs, impair the efficiency of the insurance industry, probably increase the number of uninsured, and worsen the deficit even as it raises taxes. Of course, it will probably also provide health insurance for some people who don't have it, but nobody argues that because the response, "But we can't afford it," is so obvious and so devastating. No, they change to subject to immigration. They say the Tea Party isn't really motivated by fiscal conservatism, but by bigotry against illegal immigrants. It's a despairing argument-- yeah, our side sucks, but the other guys are even worse-- but an effective one. And now the Republicans have walked into the trap.
It still looks like there will be no pro-freedom candidates in 2010. It's a choice between fascists and socialists. (Of course the historical analogies aren't literal-- both parties are more democratic than Lenin or Hitler-- but they are apt.) It still looks like Republican nativist stupidity and thuggishness is going to prevent 2010 from being the referendum on Big Government that the country so desperately needs, and voters whose consciences forbid them to support the party of Jan Brewer are doomed to be interpreted as favoring regulatory takeovers of health care and Wall Street and who knows what else in the years to come. That doesn't seem as bad as it did. Western European social democracy, with its sad stagnation, is a bleak prospect, but after the police state future of which Arizona has made itself the symbol, to be France or Germany suddenly seems a very tolerable fate.
Anyway, such is the dismal state of the political class, and the protests don't change it. And yet to see those people. To listen to the children tell their stories, to see the dignity with which they face the dignity of deportation. To hear illegal immigrants speak openly on the platform, declaring their willingness to "fill the jails until they're sick of it," emulating the civil disobedience of Martin Luther King. To sing and shout together. The people united will never be defeated. Obama, escucha, estamos en la lucha... There was a wiry, irrepressible old man in the crowd near me, hardly the image of the professional agitator, seemingly a laborer of well over 50, short, and oddly inattentive in a way, yet I noticed how the enthusiasm of the day throbbed in him, and that he kept starting slogans that would be picked up by others. There was a certain dignity about him. Maybe that's the word to summarize the day. Dignity. Standing up for human dignity in the face of "papers please" tyrants out of tsarist Russia. To stand together, to know what we want, to know what we believe in, to know that we are in the right and that the world, uncomfortably shuffling and looking askance and hemming and hawing and rationalizing, knows it too-- that fills the spirit with faith, with hope, that dispels pessimism. I think there was a Greek philosopher held-- and of course the Christians believe it, too, in the end-- that a good man cannot be harmed. Win or lose, he who is in the right is glorious; win or lose, the unjust, the oppressor's lot is shame.
This blog post by Roger Simon struck me for its honesty, in contrast to the cowardly evasions of Peggy Noonan:
These past weeks, I’ve had to deal with a couple of large dying acacias in my backyard that were threatening to tumble onto my neighbor’s roof on the downhill side. Not good.
I called my regular gardening service and they wanted $1900 to pull out the two trees. Again not good. I tried another service. They wanted $1700. Ditto. Then I crossed my fingers and tried the phone number from one of those smudgy business cards that pop up in your mailbox. A guy came over, Hispanic, in his fifties. I had no idea whether he was illegal or not and certainly didn’t ask. His English was pretty good. Good enough to quote me five hundred dollars, which I accepted. A crew showed up a few days later and did the job just fine in four hours. Some of them spoke English, some only Spanish. I doubt they were citizens, but again I didn’t ask. They were nice guys and I was happy. I had saved myself 1200 bucks.
So I’m a hypocrite if I support the Arizona legislation, so I won’t formally, although I sympathize with it. We’re all in a puddle of goo when it comes to immigration, especially all of us here in the Southwest. And we’re all poseurs.
But no, not all of us. I know the way out of the "puddle of goo." Do what the Bible and the Statue of Liberty and your conscience says. Welcome the stranger. How to do so is a bit complex, but it doesn't seem so hard once you've made up to do the right thing, whatever the cost. I don't judge Roger Simon and others who are still stuck in the swamps of cognitive dissonance. I just feel gratitude to have found the way out of them.
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