Sunday, January 14, 2018

IMMIGRATION: A RADICAL PROPOSAL

JAZZMAN CHRONICLES IN THE AGE OF TRUMP:  JANUARY 2018.




IMMIGRATION: A RADICAL PROPOSAL

BY JACK RANDOM


You came to this country without invitation.  We did not ask you to come.  We did not want you to stay.  It was against our wishes that you invaded our lands and invited more of your kind to come until a trickle became a creek and a creek became a river that swallowed a continent. 

Whatever good will greeted you in the beginning you have worn it out.  We did not need the fruits of your labor.  This great and fertile land served its people well before you arrived and it will do so long after you’ve departed.  We have heard more than enough of your self-proclaimed contributions to our society and little concerning the harm you have done.   Before your arrival crime was a fraction of what it is today.  Murder, drug use and thievery have increased a hundred fold since your people decided to make your homes here. 

Since you came to this land without consent and remained here without authorization we must consider you outlaws.  The law is the law.  You either abide by the law or you defy it.  If you came to this country without the authorization and consent of its citizens, by the laws of man, nature and God, you committed a crime.  You are therefore criminals.  Your children and your children’s children are the products of a criminal act.  To sanctify them in perpetuity is to reward criminality and to sanction lawlessness. 

The color of your skin is of no concern.  Your values are of no interest.  Since your seminal act was one of defiance and criminality, we may presume that your values are deficient and that you passed some measure of your deficiencies onto your offspring.  Since you left the country of your birth and heritage – a nation that by all rights deserved your loyalty – we may presume that your patriotism is as thin as a sheath of plastic.  It is malleable and bends to the will of whoever currently holds power over you. 

You came to our land and refused to honor our ways.  You built your own communities separate from our own.  You built towns and cities with walls to protect you from us when in fact it we required protection from you.  You cut down our forests, stole our resources, poisoned our water, destroyed our homes and told us we must learn and honor your ways, your words and your laws.  You ordered us to leave our homes and forced us to live on lands that no one wanted.  But when your precious metals and black rocks and burning liquids were discovered there, you forced us onto new lands that no one wanted. 

You called this the law because it was written on paper and you forced us to comply.  When we fought back you showed us how powerful your weapons of destruction were.  You showed us at Sand Creek, the Washita River, the Greasy Grassy and dozens of other sites made sacred by the blood of the fallen. 

We recognize your laws for what they are and what they are not.  They do not honor justice or fairness or right against wrong.  They are the laws of greed and power.  You take what you want and destroy what you will.  You go to war without reason in lands far away.  You want to bend people everywhere to your will as you have tried to bend us but we will bend no further. 

We have tried to teach you to live with the land but your hearts are closed.  We have tried to show you where your recklessness leads but you close your eyes.  We can close our eyes no longer.  You are destroying the land the Great Spirit entrusted to us.  It is time for the great experiment to end. 

We have allowed you to live among us for hundreds of years and we have come to the conclusion that you will not change.  You will continue to take more than you need.  You will continue to destroy the land.  You will continue to poison the air and water.  You will preserve nothing for future generations. 

So we have come to this conclusion:  You must go.  You must return to where you came from.  Maybe they will welcome you.  Maybe they will not.  But you are no long wanted here.  We ask you to take your money, your machines and your weapons and go. 

We are not uncaring.  We know that all of your people are not the same.  There are those who argue that some of you should be allowed to stay.  But the elders say:  If we let only a few remain, soon there will be many and they will reclaim the land.  The cycle that leads only to destruction will begin again. 

This we cannot allow.  So go.  We wish you well. 

Mitakuye Oyasin. 

Jazz.

JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES, VOLUMES I-X (CROW DOG PRESS 2015), WASICHU – THE KILLING SPIRIT, HARD TIMES – THE WRATH OF AN ANGRY GOD AND PAWNS TO PLAYERS – THE STAIRWAY SCANDAL, A MATCH FOR THE WHITE HOUSE AND THE PUTIN GAMBIT (CROW DOG PRESS).  HIS FIRST NOVEL, GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION, WAS PUBLISHED BY DRY BONES PRESS (2000) AND RE-ISSUED BY CROW DOG PRESS (2017).