Having a Hard Time Breathing

There’s nothing wrong with my lungs or body.  This is a heart thing.  A soul thing.  I hurt, I fear, I feel.

I grew up in Tulare County in California’s Central Valley.  Miles of farm land surrounded my hometown.  You couldn’t get to the next town without driving past and through dairies, farms, ranches.  You’d see laborers in the field year round.  Planting, harvesting, pruning, irrigating.  These were not white people bent over, picking and carrying.  These were migrants and others who took jobs most white residents didn’t want.  Too much pride.  And frankly, it was far too physically demanding.  Who wants to do back breaking work?  Isn’t that too much like folks in cotton fields?  Poor folks, uneducated folks, folks not like us.

I grew up with Greeks, Armenians, Dutch, Portuguese, Hmong, Mexicans.  I went to school with all of them.  And I never once thought to ask, or care, if they were legal, or if their parents were legal.  The kids I knew came from hardworking families and whether brown, white, black they were all contributing.  Did any of these kids belong to gangs?  I’m sure.  We had all kinds of gangs, too.  Not just Mexican.  There were rough white groups that felt their supremacy.  There are always groups that want to flex and dominate.

But those people are in the minority.  Those are not the families, and parents, and grandparents who have worked their entire lives to give their children opportunities they didn’t know back ‘home’, wherever that home was.  I was always so proud to be an American because my America in my Central Valley was diverse.  It was special.  It was a point of pride that we could all be different but come together and be one nation, under God.

ICE has no place in my Central California, or my California.  The Native American tribes were here first, and the Mexicans, and the Spaniards.  We have never been a lily white Jamestown, God fearing Christians fleeing from religious persecution.  California is a land of land…acreage, farms, ranches, and the people to turn this land into something that can feed and clothe America.

I mean, sure, ICE, round up the criminals, the ones that committed violent crimes, but not the ones that are defined as criminal because they came here illegally.  Not the people I have known my entire life, people who filled my classroom as fellow students, and then later as my students at St. Helen’s in Clovis, a school where the majority of my students came from Spanish speaking homes, and so many of the parents worked two jobs–in the fields and canneries–to send their kids to Catholic school because they too wanted the American dream.

Here’s the thing.  ICE isn’t just getting the violent criminals despite what President Trump says.  ICE has quotas.  ICE has to meet those quotas, just like the highway patrol has quotas each month, too.

There’s no need to come to me or at me with your reasons why what is happening is good.  If you’re a citizen you have the luxury to say it’s good.  You have no fear.  You have safety.  But I love people, real people, not just the wealthy and the privileged, and those who can sit in a high tower above the pain.  I choose the people.  I choose the pain.  I would rather love with those that Christ loved, then turn a blind eye and think oh well, it had to be done.

Did it?

Did it, really.