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| Photo: Ileana Johnson |
When I lived in several towns in rural Mississippi, we had
to drive 59-67 miles, about an hour, to get to the nearest decent-sized mall or
grocery store, or an hour to two hours to Alabama, to shop in a large mall or
to see a medical specialist in Birmingham. They have since built larger local
hospitals in rural MS.
Then super Walmart came to town and made grocery shopping
much easier. A Costco and Sam’s Club were added an hour away. But driving was a
breeze – the highways were good, well-marked with fluorescent paint for night
and inclement weather driving, and there was no congestion, or rush hours
except at Christmas. Living in the northeast now, I can drive 8 miles and it
takes an hour or longer, depending on how clogged highways are.
No restaurant chains could come to town for decades because commercial
land was owned by seven wealthy old-moneyed families who also had small mom and
pop businesses in town and did not want competition from big chain restaurants
or stores.
They had strong allies in the worshipping community.
Besides, nobody wanted to sell the land, they
just wanted to lease it. What business would want to build on leased land,
knowing that, when the lease ended, they could change their minds about the
land and the building owner would have some hard choices to make.
There were many churches and parishioners objected to new
buildings going up too close to them, especially restaurant establishments that
had the potential to sell alcoholic beverages. Liquor laws were strict, nobody
could sell alcohol within so many hundred feet from a church, or so we were
told. Nobody bothered to check, we just believed the preachers.
There was one Mexican restaurant that ran a good business
and very few foreigners like me and mom. We were ostracized as “European trash”
and by extension our daughters were ostracized as well. Parents seldom allowed
their children to socialize with ours because their grandmother spoke a foreign
tongue and we were neither Baptist, nor Methodist, nor Episcopalian.
Some parents were more open-minded and allowed their children
to forge friendships with ours, but they were few and far-between. They were
the punished children of the “exotic” me who did not look like them and came
from a communist country they had no idea where it was located on a map.
One Chinese man who opened a popular and very successful
restaurant in town, tried to build a home he designed in an affluent
neighborhood where homes were quite pricey. He encountered problems turning his
dream home into reality as the resident objected to the height of his “mansion”
and the possibility that he would bring in too many red Chinese among them.
Today in northeastern neighborhoods of relatively pricey homes,
some owners transfer to other jobs, towns, and states, and have no choice but to
rent their property if it does not sell quickly. Several south of the border families
and Muslim families rent one home, trashing the place, its yard and surroundings,
and filling the street with garbage. One Mexican illegal woman, in order to
avoid deportation, converted from Catholicism to Islam. She then sub-leased the
basement of her rented home to a Muslim family of ten.
Many litter the local parks when they picnic there even
though there are plenty of trashcans posted nearby. In their culture, they have
no garbage cans or garbage pickup, so they throw their refuse out the door, out
the window, into the street, parks, etc. They think that water and rivers will
cleanse it all. Except it all dumps into the Chesapeake Bay.
The other day, a Spanish speaking man was changing his car’s
oil and dumping the dirty oil into the nearby drain, even though the posted signs
clearly said in English, “do not dump anything into the drain.” Perhaps our
government should have translated those signs into Spanish too, they do translate
everything else.
A former academic colleague from Venezuela said to me years
ago (she was a member of the local La Rasa), “they are just too dumb to learn
English, they are illiterate in their own language, so, we must teach our American
children to speak Spanish in order to help them function in our society.”
To show their benevolence, the local southern Baptists
sponsored a few defectors from countries like China, Poland, East Germany, and
the former Czechoslovakia. They paraded them in church every Sunday as if they
were the heathens saved from the clutches of atheistic communism. Mom and I
made a point in befriending them and truly helping them to get a better start
and to understand what expected them in a southern town leery of foreigners. In
the south then, you could also be from another part of America and not be fully
accepted either. That is probably true of many places in the world who do not
like outsiders.
They stayed just long enough to learn some English and a
place to live, then started job hunting, saved enough cash, and left for
greener pastures and opportunities as soon as they were financially able. A
town with high unemployment rate and high welfare rates was no place to set
roots, especially since they would be forever looked upon as outsiders.
Since then, the south, like other parts of the country, has
been invaded by illegal aliens, Catholics from the south of the border, and
Muslims from other parts of the world, some brought in by Obama as economic refugees,
others crossing the border illegally, posing as Mexicans.
I cannot imagine what the city leaders and the town’s
residents think about these new arrivals who have no intention of assimilating
and becoming Americans, or respecting its traditions, on the contrary, want to
change them to the life and culture where they fled from.
Mom and I were “Euro trash” forty years ago when we became
Americans and contributed to society, respecting and embracing its culture, its
traditions, its people, and its history. If I could only see some of these
people face to face and ask them, what now? We were not good enough for you, what
are you going to do to protect your precious American culture and children now?
How long can you ostracize and ignore these new arrivals, who refuse to assimilate,
before they overwhelm you through demographics of the womb?
