The Town of Babylon

by Alejandro Varela

And so was seeded a lifetime of contradiction: Stay out of the midday sun. Avoid bright colors. Cover up. Lower your voice. At the same time: Be yourself. Be proud. Be the best. Be. Succeed while hiding in plain sight. Be better in order to be equal.

“No. I worry about how aging makes humans conservative. I think it has something to do with fear. Fear for one’s own safety, fear of damage to one’s property, fear of new and unknown things. Adult-onset conservatism is also just exhaustion. A lifetime of being optimistic about life’s unsolved problems fosters disappointment and, eventually, pessimism. But no one wants to believe they’re pessimistic, so they switch perspectives and move the goalposts. The injustices that could have been remedied with more resources or more empathy transform into intractable dilemmas that we then argue must be addressed with austerity and hard knocks, when the truth is that we never pumped in enough resources or empathy to have truly solved anything. Boom: conservative. Or maybe it isn’t a consequence of fears, but a fear in and of itself. The very fear of examining the past and our complicity in that past.”

We are, after all, a society that mistreats people to the point of damage so that we can then use the damage as a pretext for more mistreatment.

“ ‘Doesn’t matter’? You just said all cops were evil. And I gave you an example of two good guys.” “Even the good guys are ruined eventually. You can’t have a two-tiered system of power in society. People walking around with a license to kill. That’ll corrupt anyone, especially in an uneven society that uses the pretext of poverty to legitimize racism.”

I don’t hate this town. I’m uneasy in it.

Everyone here has a past and ancestors, just as I do, who escaped barbarity, misery, oppression, or a bad time, just as mine did, and came here in search of a dignity that wasn’t exactly waiting with open arms—ditto. The American immigrant experience has been a mash-up of The Godfather and Toy Story set in a factory full of crisscrossing conveyor belts, where the only possible endpoints are a gilded throne or an incinerator.

Unlike earlier waves of immigrants, today’s masses are here because this country, their final destination, is responsible for their miseries back home. If not for all of the coups, dethronings, assassinations, covert missions, all-out assaults, drug wars, disinformation campaigns, faux-unity NGOs, pipelines, bilateral treaties, trilateral contracts, regional trade groups, Coke commercials, moonwalks, Peace Corps, missionaries, scholarships, brain drains, kidnappings, bribery, fraud, Academy Awards, and Avengers movies, they wouldn’t have come here. They, including my parents, left countries and families and friends and restaurants and movie theaters and bookstores and crushes they’d hoped to marry and favorite guitars and inimitable ice-cream flavors and an irreplaceable variety of fruits and vegetables, to be here, in the place that made their place uninhabitable, only to be reminded regularly that they were unwelcome, that there would always be a target on their backs, until they soon became like the first batch of pilgrims: corrupt, ignorant, spiteful, sedentary, intolerant, uncouth, fearful, and unkind boot-licking tools of fascism. In a word, American. Most of us, anyway.