If the people in a country don’t like the living conditions which that country’s culture, religion, political system, attitudes, and values have produced, and they leave that country and come to the United States looking for conditions less challenging to their lives, they should strive to understand and honor the positive values, governmental structure, laws, and cultural aspects that make the U.S. a better choice. A great many do, however, unfortunately not all. Too many have other ideas.
Too often it seems the good and generous nature of very many (most?) lifelong U.S. citizens is seen as a weakness to be exploited. Too many immigrants bring the fear and predatory practices they saw and learned in their country of origin here with them and exercise them. Essentially working to recreate the conditions that they fled in their country of origin here in the U.S. Not exactly though; in a way that they feel they are the “winners”. The “losers” are the American people and the American culture. It seems many Americans have been conditioned to the belief that tolerating these incursions is somehow noble.
How did this conditioning come about? That’s an easy one: from the predatory, egoistic, callous practices that have been being foisted upon the American public by other lifelong Americans for decades now. The corporate and private profiteers and their accomplices and minions in the media, in government, in educational and religious institutions. All the repetitions that American adults and children are exposed to of the messages that greed is good, look out for number one, lying/cheating/stealing/manipulating are just what has to be done to get rich. You know, the messages that show up over and over again in movies, music and television. Also attitudes nurtured within increasingly cutthroat competitive practices of all kinds: academics, sports, business, and playing fields across the nation. If tolerating these conditions is noble when they are being acted out by lifelong U.S. citizens, why is it any different in regard to immigrants?
We have allowed our nation to develop a culture of predation, distrust, callousness, and avarice to the point that when people carrying those attitudes immigrate, in whatever manner, into our towns and cities, a whole lot of people hardly give it a second thought.
Right now avarice and callousness are being extolled everywhere from the gangsters in our towns and cities, the CEOs and Boards of Directors of our largest corporations, all the way to the halls of Congress and the White House. But don’t think for a minute that this is something new and exclusive to President Trump, it isn’t. It’s been going on in successive Presidential administrations for decades. I tend to think that it’s been going on so pervasively for so long that President Trump doesn’t understand what can be so offensive to so many American people by his being so brazen about it.
I imagine in the social circles that U.S. Presidents and CEOs of large corporations run in such brazen attitudes have been flaunted openly for some time.
In the meantime, the common citizens of the U.S. have been reeling under the ever-increasing economic austerity that the demand for increasing wealth by the wealthiest and politically influential (the two go hand in hand nowadays) imposes.
Don’t get me wrong, we don’t need socialism or communism. We don’t need, I hope, to tear the entire system down and start developing a new culture from the ashes. We need people to get in touch with their innate, internal spiritual being in it’s fullness and realize the benefits, the necessity, of loving our neighbor as ourselves. We need individual thoughtfulness about what a good, healthy society actually is and requires. To restate something I’ve seen; we need to love people and use wealth, not the other way around. When enough of us see the truth of this and actively practice it in our day to day lives, being careful not to encourage or support the current widespread corruption and greed, maybe we can tip the scales toward a sustainable culture.
