Love It or Leave It
I’ve been seeing a bit about America in the various journals and weblogs I read, and it prompts some amount of reflection on my part as well. I am, after all, living in a different country than I was born in without being an ex-pat or an exile. I don’t regard myself particularly as an immigrant either, if only because I do not intend to relinquish my citizenship. I moved to a country where I already spoke the language and arrived with a work permit – how lucky is that? When I was travelling up to Connecticut for work, I’d see a dozen or so Mexican or South American itinerants on a dozen or so various street corners waiting to be selected for a day’s labor, a common enough sight across the U.S. The English available to those men or to the shopkeepers in Queens and elsewhere is limited, and how many across the country have sufficient Spanish or Korean to make a conversation? Across Europe, though, how many have enough Turkish or Ibo to speak to the laborers who come to live in those countries? Arabic may be a common linguistic currency among the Arab nations, but I seriously question how far that will get anyone below a certain level of privilege and the education that comes with it. Koranic instruction in a madrassa will only get you so far, if you even manage that much. And how many of these immigrant laborers actually have government-issued visas? In Germany, France, and Britain you can read in the papers about the trials and discrimination against immigrants that sometimes erupt into violence. The same thing happens in the U.S. It happens in Australia, too. When it happens anywhere, there is an outcry, and rightly so. When it happens in the U.S. there’s an outcry everywhere. Fair enough, because the U.S. touts its tolerance, it’s welcome to immigrants, its status as the best place on earth. I sometimes think the other Western nations do a better job, except of course for the National Front and the Holocaust deniers, both of whom have their incarnations in the States, but who have an easier time being heard in Europe, just as the Islamofascists apparently do in the Middle East and Indonesia. Certainly the U.S. stands as a paradise compared to Africa and South America, and much of the South Pacific is incapable of sustaining itself as fully functioning nations. Yes, the President of my country is an idiot and his administration is intent upon enriching a selected few (I didn’t vote for him, really, and I won’t when he stands for re-election either), but look at some of the other world leaders and tell me you don’t have any complaints. The days of “love it or leave it” are long past, or should be, so I worry when I see abusive legislation like the US Patriots Act, especially when I don’t feel I can entirely trust the Supreme Court. Similarly, it concerns me when I see ASIO get expanded powers of arrest and detention, here in Australia, especially when the treatment of immigrants, refugees among them, is so troubling. Whether it’s John Ashcroft of Phillip Ruddock, I’m concerned by what I see. But again, I’m lucky. I’m a citizen of a country where I am free to speak out, to gather with like-minded others and to speak collectively, and I live in another country where I have the same rights, among people who act on those rights, just as they do in the country I left. There are surveillance cameras everywhere – in Sydney, New York, Hamburg, Glasgow . . . – and there are city leaders who deny permits to protest marchers, employing police to contain rallies, subjecting Nobel Prize winners to house arrest, but in the nations of the West, that isn’t the end of the story. We all focus on the negative events, and we should – eternal vigilance, remember – but we should also remember and hold firmly to the principles that make up our freedoms and those that allow us to enshrine them. Laws are made by people; they do not exist separately from us in some distinct, ethereal sphere. The Rule of Law is a collective agreement, and it’s a good one, but only insofar as the laws are also good. That’s why Constitutional amendments banning flag desecration or Gay marriage are so offensive. That the U.S. Constitution is drawn broadly enough to allow such amendments is dangerous only insofar as there are those who would abuse the Rule of Law to impose their own limited scope of vision out of selfishness – that’s tyranny, the other kind of Rule of Law. But Prohibition was repealed, and the amendments necessary to ensure civil rights for all still stand. Look, it’s not perfect. I can’t point to a single government or system that is. Compulsory voting sounds good, and maybe it mostly works; there are as many systems as there are democratic governments. Parliaments and Prime Ministers seem to manage to get things done (or not) just as much as the U.S. Congress and President. At the time, back in 1776, America was ruled from overseas by a government not significantly different from that of any other European power. Jefferson and Adams and Franklin and the rest sought to supply a better option, a “more perfect union.” A lot of other countries followed suit over the ensuing decades, either by evolution or by revolution and we’ve been making improvements ever since, not without mistakes, but not without progress either. It’s when the errors are born of hubris that we stumble worst, just like anybody else.