Great letter from one of our newest literary talents
Paolo Bacigalupi is the young author of "The Windup Girl" and several other books of note.
He posted this letter to friends yesterday:
One of the things I think about a lot in my writing is how and why the future breaks. The small and large moments that lead to big, unexpected drops into worlds we didn't want.
Over the last weeks, I've watched a steady stream rhetoric pour out of the White House: that we're in danger; that the bad people are out there; that illegal immigrants are everywhere--taking jobs from us, stealing, raping, killing-- always the message is that we should fear, and that "our" country is being taken over. We should fear. Or, alternatively, we should be enraged that liberals keep blocking our path to safety. As if liberals don't want to be safe as well.
Yesterday in Kansas, a gunman shot two men who he thought were Middle-Eastern. It turns out the two he targeted were actually Indians, engineers, who worked for Garmin. Apparently he looked at those brown men who had slightly different accents, and he just couldn't stand it. He couldn't stop pestering them about their visa status, and whether they were illegal--and then he decided they didn't belong. So he went out, got a gun, and returned. He shot them, saying, "Get out of my country!"
The White House denies that the President has any responsibility for this, but I have a hard time taking that seriously. The President has been tweeting with (!) exclamation (!) points (!) for weeks about how bad immigration is, and how dangerous terrorists are (as if we don't know), and every time he does this, and every time Breitbart or Fox, or Hannity, or Limbaugh, or whoever amplifies this message of fear, it means angry, impressionable, drunk, or crazed people listen.
And then they go get their guns.
This new America is not the one I was taught to believe in, or grew up in. The one where we work hard and find opportunities. The one where we're a melting pot of many different immigrant peoples. The one that's open, and strong, and fearless. When I lived in China, I was always proud of our country for our free press, and our free people, and the fact that none of us lived in fear of our government--or of anything, really.
My wife's family immigrated here from India. She is brown. She was born in Florida, grew up in Connecticut and Massachusetts, went to college in Ohio, and now has spent almost twenty years here in Colorado-and yet she commented as we watched news of an immigration inspection targeting a domestic plane flight, that she thought it would be better if both she and our son carried their passports whenever they fly, from now on. Just to make sure there weren't any misunderstandings. Just to be cautious.
I've lived in countries that demanded my papers in every city, in every train station, on every bus, at every hotel, at every place I went. I was disgusted by those places--those third world dictatorships that controlled people with fear, and police informants, and surprise inspections of your papers.
And now, I find that I've woken up in a country I thought I knew, and it feels more and more like those countries that I had so much contempt for. I feel less safe here, my wife feels less safe here, and I'm deeply worried for my half-Indian son. My mother-in-law calls and urges us to be careful where we live, because she knows we live in Trump country, and as much as I'd like to dismiss her fears, the fact is that those Indian engineers in Kansas also dismissed the idea that they were in danger.
The truth is that none of us really knows what "safe" means anymore, because our President keeps ratcheting up the rhetoric, and there are a lot of angry people who like to listen to him.
I don't really have any words for what I'm watching happen. We're suddenly the America that interrogates Australian picture book authors at the border, and seizes French historians, and forces NASA scientists to unlock their phones. We're an America that chases down people who came here because the places they fled were hell. We're an America that shoots brown people, apparently because "they" don't belong in "our" country.
When did it become normal dinnertime conversation for my wife and I to assess if we still feel safe in the small town that I was born and raised in? How is it that so many people are still supporting Trump? Republicans, yes. Pence, yes. Trump? Trump is something different. He is not moral. His style of presidency is more suited to Uganda or Sierra Leone, and yet here he is, leading America, and regardless of how you may have voted, for my family, his rhetoric is dangerous.
I don't know what to think any more. I'm at a loss. I keep saying to myself that this is not normal, but I'm starting to fear that it's becoming normal.
If there's anything I would ask of people who read this, some of whom may have voted for Trump, some of whom may not have, it's to look closely at what he does, and see how closely it resembles the behaviors of countries we used to stand above. I believe we are better than this. Look closely at what he does. Don't treat this moment as normal.
In Kansas, there was one other man who that gunman shot. A bystander. And let's say this specifically, a white guy, who chased after him. An American who risked his life because he didn't want people like that gunman running free and going after others. A real American, if anyone can be.
In the America that I want to live in, real Americans stand up to violence like that in Kansas. And they stand against the rhetoric that encourages this violence. Regardless of politics, I'm hoping that we can all at least agree on that. I'm very much hoping that we can stop treating Trump and his fear-mongering as normal. I'm hoping that we can agree that this is something we must stand up to, and push back against.
Push back. Please, everyone. Push back.
= new reply since forum marked as read
real American with courage enough to stand against a trump ameriKKKan. He does have my respect.
He represents light in a very long and dark tunnel full of ravening deplorable beasts.
