Can We Please Stop Blaming Immigrants?

Is there some formula to determine who is not descended from immigrants? 

We now know that even those folks we thought were Natives had pushed other people off the land as they moved in.  So even my Blackfoot and Osage connections were immigrants at some point. 

My mother's folks came from Germany in 1752(John Ludwig, who was a sea captain in the revolutionary war) and my dad's people were well settled in what is now West Virginia in the mid 1750's.  Somehow, between the 1750's and the late 1800's my people worked their way across this continent until here I am, a native Washingtonian living about as far West as we can go on the lower 48.  Some migration.  None of us would be here if it were not for daring, brave or  desperate people striking out into the unknown. 

When I first saw the rabbit hutch-like shacks occupied by migrant workers in the fields around Yakima, I didn't look down my nose at the people huddled there.  Instead it reminded me of stories my folks told me about their own humble beginning as dirt farmers in Spokane Valley.  They lived in a two room shack with a path to the out house and a pump outside the back door. 

So many of my people were farmers and miners and loggers and plain working class people.  Their labor built this mighty nation.  As a reward they were spat upon and looked down upon by the very people they helped make rich.  Many of them just accepted this as their lot in life, going to their churches and praying to their God, even knowing that their God was smiling with great favor on their Masters, while turning His back on them.  But somehow they thought that if they worked hard enough and prayed hard and long enough it would all work out. 

My dad took a different path.  Early on he became a labor organizer and a Radical.  He did not believe that the meek would inherit the earth, but instead they would be buried in it in unmarked graves. 

My dad taught me that being Patriotic did not mean that you bent your head and took the Masters lash.  True Patriots speak out against the inequities around them. 

Even knowing that this is now the United Corporate Empire of America, true Patriots call for a Peoples Revolution, a taking of power from the Ruling Class. 

 

Curious Carl