We Are Becoming the Ones

Neocons like to talk about "personal responsibility." This is shorthand for "don't expect the government to fix it for you" (unless you're a bank). This idea is also paraded as "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" (whether you have any or not) and the myth of the "self-made man" (if you're a woman, you can just forget it).

Think for a minute about these images: is it literally possible for a person to pull herself up by her bootstraps? Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines bootstrap as follows: "a looped strap sewed at the side or the rear top of a boot to help in pulling it on." OK. Now imagine yourself sitting on the floor. You're wearing boots, with bootstraps. Now pull yourself up by those bootstraps. Right. Not happening.

And has there ever been a "self-made man," or woman for that matter? No one makes her own self or has only himself to thank for a lifetime of achievements. We are all way more connected to each other than most of us ever realize or acknowledge. We are all reliant on our families, our communities, our teachers, our friends, the kindness of strangers.

Still, there is certainly a place for "personal responsibility." Yes, indeed, you are responsible for your own actions. But responsibility doesn't end there. You are also responsible for how your actions affect those around you. George Lakoff asserts that "social responsibility" involves empathy. "Empathy is not mere sympathy. Putting oneself in the shoes of others brings with it the responsibility to act on that empathy—to be 'our brother's keeper and our sister's keeper'—and to act to improve ourselves, our country, and the world."

So whereas "personal responsibility" may be taken to mean "caring for oneself," "social responsibility" is taking care of others as well: family, community, country, and even members of groups to which one does not belong: other communities, other faiths and belief systems, other countries, other continents.

The raising of personal responsibility to a position of paramount importance, boiling it down to unbridled self-interest and rampant greed, separating it from empathy and social responsibility—these ideological land mines underlie our current crisis, which is way more than an economic crisis. What we are experiencing is a crisis of identity and morality and values.

When we adopt social responsibility and use it to temper and contextualize our personal responsibility, we begin to realize that in the long term all of our destinies are interdependent. My well-being, the well-being of my family, and that of my community are intertwined with the well-being of people living thousands of miles away, people whose language, culture, economic means, and values are very different from my own.

Our baser instincts are to think in terms of "us versus them." This thinking also involves the assumption that there's just not enough for all of us, so we are necessarily in competition with "them" for the stuff we need (or think we need). Our better angels, though, aspire to more than greed and rampant consumerism. They aspire to looking out for the welfare of all in the secure knowledge that everything we need is available to us in abundance.

According to Robert Creamer,

Responsibility for others is not some "soft" or "utopian" value; it is critical to our success and survival on our increasingly crowded planet. More than that, it's the key that will both prevent us from destroying ourselves—and can unlock exponentially expanding human possibility in the 21st century.

So the old "us versus them" needs to grow up and evolve into "we." Notice that, grammatically speaking, us and them are both objects, whereas we is a subject. The objects are acted upon, whereas the subject does the acting. We are the actors; we are taking responsibility, not only for ourselves but for our fellow humans and our fellow creatures and our lovely green planet. We. We are becoming the ones we have been waiting for.

¡Sí, se puede! Now Is the Time!

In a Mercury News article about Wednesday's marches for immigration reform, Juliana Barbassa quotes a scholar from the Foreign Policy Research Institute: "Go down to the unemployment office and ask what people lined up think of immigration reform—you'll get an earful. . . . It's the wrong time, at the wrong place, and the wrong issue to invest your political capital now." Bull hockey (ahem). I heartily disagree. Al contrario, this is exactly the right moment. Exactly.

Ah, well, consider the source: According to SourceWatch.org, the FPRI is a conservative think tank, "an activist organization driven by its own ideology." It describes itself as being "devoted to bringing the insights of scholarship to bear on the development of policies that advance U.S. national interests" and lists as one of its goals to "shape the national debate on foreign policy through frequent appearances in the national news media."

So what we have here is the FPRI seeking to "shape the national debate." That has been much of our problem: not that we are widely opposed, but that we are noisily opposed. In other words, we are being bullied. Can I please hear a loud "Stop that!" from all good people of common decency and good sense?! Thank you.

In fact, while the most recent attempt at immigration reform was still before Congress in 2007, according to a CBS poll, "most Americans surveyed support measures contained in the bill, including a guest worker program and the possibility of permanent residency for illegal immigrants who have lived and worked in the U.S." Granted that our economy is in much worse shape now than it was then, but there is no indication that vast numbers of the American people have changed their minds about this issue as a result of the economic downturn.

Decent, good-hearted American people—that is, the majority of Americans—understand that immigration is a very complex issue and that unauthorized immigrants don't come here on a whim or because they were bored down south.

But there are some bullies in our midst, and unfortunately they're very noisy. They would like you to think that they're in the majority, that the American people will not tolerate immigration reform while the economy is in such terrible shape. This is the reality that they are actively trying to bring into being just by repeating it over and over again. Please, do not let them.

In an article posted on the Rockridge Institute website, George Lakoff and Sam Ferguson make some excellent suggestions for how we can be the ones to shape the national debate:

• Address the issue as one of globalization. "If capital is going to freely cross borders, should people and labor be able to do so as well, going where globalization takes the jobs?"
• Address the issue as a humanitarian crisis involving "mass migration and displacement of people from their homelands at a rate of 800,000 people a year. . . . As a humanitarian crisis, the solution could involve the UN or the Organization of American States."
• Address immigration as a civil rights issue. "For the most part, [the 12 million immigrants living in the U.S. without authorization] are assimilated into the American system, but are forced to live underground and in the shadows because of their legal status. They are denied ordinary civil rights."
• Address immigration as a "cheap labor issue." "Undocumented immigrants allow employers to pay low wages, which in turn provide the cheap consumer goods we find at WalMart and McDonald's. They are part of a move towards the cheap lifestyle, where employers and consumers find any way they can to save a dollar, regardless of the human cost."

Activating these frames rather than the old "they're eating our pie" frame will help us to reshape the national debate and enable lawmakers to enact just, compassionate, and pragmatic immigration reform.

One of the primary reasons that now is the time to push for a just and humane immigration policy is that the Democrats would not have had such a sweeping victory in November had it not been for Latino voters, for whom immigration reform is an especially high priority. In other words, we have some political capital right this instant. We mustn't let it slip away.

The FPRI and myriad nativist hate groups recognize that political capital, and they're afraid. So they are using their well-practiced tactics to try to convince us and everyone else that now is not the time and that we have no political capital. They know that the momentum is with us. They know that our time is now.

The following quotation, as big as life, appears on the WhiteHouse.gov page describing the Obama administration's agenda regarding immigration:

The time to fix our broken immigration system is now. … We need stronger enforcement on the border and at the workplace. … But for reform to work, we also must respond to what pulls people to America. … Where we can reunite families, we should. Where we can bring in more foreign-born workers with the skills our economy needs, we should.
—Barack Obama, Statement on U.S. Senate Floor, May 23, 2007

I could do without the bit about "stronger enforcement," but remember this was before the launch of the horrendous ICE raids. I'm heartened by Obama's pragmatism as well as his refreshing willingness to see the complexities involved: "For reform to work, we must also respond to what pulls people to America."

And of course, our president will never forget that he himself is the son of an immigrant. The Day of the Immigrant in America is indeed at hand. The time is now. Now! That's what he said. Well, actually, he said "now" way back in 2007. In which case, the time is past due.