Immigration....and my hypocrisy
Posted: Mon Jun 13, 2016 7:23 am
I do worry about the numbers of immigrants who flood our border. Faced with a changing face of America, I face a certain unease.
I have become used to, I suppose, the dual language signs in Lowes and Home Depot and having to dial "1" for English when I call my bank. Even here in Southern Appalachia in the North Carolina mountains, there is a hispanic influence. America is changing from the eurocentric culture that I grew up in.
But I also think about my hypocrisy.
My GG grandfather fled Prussia in 1855 at age 36 with a wife and an infant. He had been wounded in the 1848 revolutions in europe and had recovered. He traveled to a settlement in Wisconsin in 1856 (that frontier had other german speakers). He spoke no or little english.
At age 40, when he did not have to, he joined the Wisconsin 3rd Cavalry and fought in the Civil War. He skirmished with indians and Missouri raiders in Kansas and Missouri and received a disablity discharge for a wound in 1864. In 1881, in his 60's, he was out in the Arizona Territory at Tombstone when the Earps, Doc Holliday, and the Clantons were shooting it up and the Apaches were still raiding the outlying areas.
He died at age 95 on the Wisconsin farm, wearing his prized cavalry boots. My grandfather told me he watched "old Henry" chop wood without a shirt in his 90's...and that he had a "hole from a chunk missing out of back shoulder" but was still vigorous.
The old man had changed his name from Heinrich to Henry, learned accented English, and left a productive brood as his legacy. We became lawyers, college professors, career servicemen, nurses, farmers, and football fans.
If I can admire his courage to leave an old life as a near serf in a small Prussian village and seek a better life in a far foreign country, and his lifelong sense of adventure and orientation towards action, why do I fret about today's immigrants who probably exhibit the same characteristics?
I puzzle that and I am not sure that I like the answers.
I have become used to, I suppose, the dual language signs in Lowes and Home Depot and having to dial "1" for English when I call my bank. Even here in Southern Appalachia in the North Carolina mountains, there is a hispanic influence. America is changing from the eurocentric culture that I grew up in.
But I also think about my hypocrisy.
My GG grandfather fled Prussia in 1855 at age 36 with a wife and an infant. He had been wounded in the 1848 revolutions in europe and had recovered. He traveled to a settlement in Wisconsin in 1856 (that frontier had other german speakers). He spoke no or little english.
At age 40, when he did not have to, he joined the Wisconsin 3rd Cavalry and fought in the Civil War. He skirmished with indians and Missouri raiders in Kansas and Missouri and received a disablity discharge for a wound in 1864. In 1881, in his 60's, he was out in the Arizona Territory at Tombstone when the Earps, Doc Holliday, and the Clantons were shooting it up and the Apaches were still raiding the outlying areas.
He died at age 95 on the Wisconsin farm, wearing his prized cavalry boots. My grandfather told me he watched "old Henry" chop wood without a shirt in his 90's...and that he had a "hole from a chunk missing out of back shoulder" but was still vigorous.
The old man had changed his name from Heinrich to Henry, learned accented English, and left a productive brood as his legacy. We became lawyers, college professors, career servicemen, nurses, farmers, and football fans.
If I can admire his courage to leave an old life as a near serf in a small Prussian village and seek a better life in a far foreign country, and his lifelong sense of adventure and orientation towards action, why do I fret about today's immigrants who probably exhibit the same characteristics?
I puzzle that and I am not sure that I like the answers.