Unthinkingly, I killed them. My hands are weapons. So too
are my intentions. And since these irritating things were so many, and so
small, I lifted my hands and clapped them quickly, and caught at least two if
not more of the little black devils. And then I washed my hands of them. And
only then did what I’d just done strike me: I’d just killed! So easily. Was it
because of their size? Me, who goes with a ready-at-hand glass and stiff-paper
to the windows, and catches wasps, flies, spiders, moths, and even the
occasional mosquito! (I almost always smile at the story the trapped little
things’ll have to tell others, out there, in the big world, about the glass
space-ship that swooped down on them while they were in an alien land, and how
they were magically transported to the outside of its foreign boundaries and
then swooshed out and set free!) But that did not happen to those two or three
teensy little black midgets, ‘miggies’, mites, fruit-flies that beleaguered my
kitchen. Clap! And they’d summarily been disposed with!
Like transitional prepositions, we find the smaller the
significance to us, the less we care, the less we accord value. Outside my
window two deer and a fawn nibble on the lawn as I type. There are frogs and
birds and bugs galore outside my house. But I do not invite them in. In fact, I
place a piece of juicily smelling fruit on my deck at the crack of my balcony
door, and hope all the fruit flies (for a whole colony of them breeds at my
kitchen waste-bin, where the fruit residues to them seem plentiful, and free,)
... I hope that the kitchen bugs, with the waste bin now disinfected, that the
kitchen devils will leave their new territory and go back to where they came
from! Go! If they don’t...? It’s my life! Mine. Or theirs?
The BBC video link (below*), if you watch it, will be indelibly horrid. Sorry.
We cannot escape that awful feeling of being overwhelmed. We cannot escape! How
to survive, let alone to thrive, among a culture that is intentionally bent on
overtaking your life? All you know, believe, cherish, and value can be
supplanted by the sheer volume of foreigners, aliens, and ‘others’ who come
across our borders. Should you too move to smaller and smaller packages of
land, where you can draw up your borders and, draw-bridge like, demand of any
person attempting entry to your castle a full, complete, comprehensive
disclosure?
We live in such fear! The incursion of ‘others’ is so
very-very difficult to integrate. If I happen to live in, say, Gondwanaland,
then the objective is that all those taking up residence will adapt to my
language, to my education system, to my cultural and commercial values, and
hopefully, even convert to my religion. But, alright, I’ll let them build their
own church and practice their own beliefs; just don’t interfere and expect me
to dismantle my own! Take over my schools. Even on my beaches, as a
Gondwanalander, I wear a hat! You may go half-dressed. Don’t hate me for not
worshiping the sun! And don’t tell me....
Expectations delivered by others can be so very hurtful.
Beliefs can be so destructive. Values can be so disenfranchising. Other’s intentions
can be so alarming! If able to start over we might, with immigration policies,
expect that before entering our county ‘the other’ would learn our language, adopt
our social and cultural ways, and agree fully to contribute toward our country
by paying taxes and doing what he or she can to make a living of dignity and
worth, instead of being a drain on the rest of us. (And ditch-digging, or
dish-washing, or laying bricks are all services of dignity and worth; I’ve
personally done all three!) Most
significantly, we’d expect that the new immigrant subscribe to our wish to
sustain that which we have, not to overwhelm us with the encroachment of an
entirely new way of being. But the missionaries didn’t do that, did they? And
history did not allow for that, did it? And throughout all of the pathways of
man, the times, they are a changing. We can but care however we can. However minutely;
indeed.