Pruning Family Trees

I’ve been getting up (some weeks with more devotion and others, like this dreary raw week, not so much) to run in the early part of the morning. Part of what I like enough to drag me out of bed is the difference of the world in that stolen hour before most of the world emerges from its cave. The quiet. Even in my suburban city full of commuter traffic. The air is still, in a similar vibration as what I might find in the more rural part of the state. That eerie, calming time between night and day when the light burns away the dark.

The world is emptier, for sure. But there are still people to see as I sleep walk/run my three miles. Other runners and dog walkers. The idiotic drivers who decide they can race at ungodly speeds down the empty roads. And lots of landscapers.

Sometimes I get annoyed with that last crew. They park on the sidewalks and block my path with equipment so I have to run into the road. Or sometimes they don’t see me and blow the organic shrapnel into my path. Or they do see me… and I hate being seen when I’m all red and sweaty. But… in spite of that… I admire that they are out there every morning, well before the world wakes up, never mind starts working. Out there mowing lawns, shoveling mulch, pruning shrubs. Working hard.

Most of them are another ethnicity. I don’t know for sure. I guess as I run by that the conversation isn’t English. I know they aren’t white (but that doesn’t mean anything). I don’t mention this in disdain. I mention this because it clicked in my head after watching Bill Maher’s New Rules last night. Yes, I know that is a sad fact I woke up to that when the debate about Arizona looms on television, when the country wants to regulate immigration, when the pundits I watch make humor out of this absurd issue.

I think it’s absurd. Maybe I’m blind to the ramifications of letting other people into our country. Maybe. I don’t know. I know that in fifth grade we had to do a project about all the different countries from where our ancestors came. Our ancestors… a lot were just one or two generations removed from recent memory. Every single kid in that class (granted, it was Oakham and there were only 25 in our combined grades) had a project to do. Because every single kid had an immigrant in their background.

But that was legal.

One of my favorite stories to tell is how my great grandfather supposedly came across the pond from Sweden to escape three marriages. We don’t know the exact truth of that. But we do know he went through the ‘legal’ channels and changed his name to Olson. So… is that moral high ground because he got an alias to avoid legal consequence someplace else? I don’t know. I don’t know the guy. I don’t judge him. I just relish the amusing story I have to tell at parties.

Of course the other part of my family celebrates the Irish blood with a vengeance. In fact, I think, sometimes, we like to pretend we’re Irish. I only have 25% of my genetic pool from Ireland. And even that… well, I think the last one hopped the pond in the mid-1800’s. When hopping the pond was something all the Germanic immigrants wanted to stop. Those drunken, Papist, lazy Irish. Stealing jobs. Spreading superstition. And they spoke such awful, unintelligible English.

When… when did it go from that to cool to be Irish? So cool that someone is excited to say Kiss me, I’m Irish even if they only have one great-great-great-great grandparent from Eire? 

Okay. Maybe I was brainwashed by the Massachusetts public school system. But I swear, we were taught that this country is a melting pot. That we are all children of immigrants. Even the founding fathers. Except the Native Americans… but… well, we won’t go there right now. That we all came from some other part of this world to make the United States of America. That we all have a unique heritage, some weird strange food our grandparents made, a difficult to describe tradition, a weird bastardization of our last name… immigration is our heritage.

So I don’t get the animosity. I really. Don’t. Get. It. Disliking immigrants… isn’t that like disliking our own families? Our own contaminated blood? Ourselves? 

Or are we just threatened by the fact that Cinco de Mayo is going to surpass St. Patrick’s Day for pretentious homeland jingoism?