The Anti-People Society

We are anti-people.

I've been hearing a lot of bitter sentiments about people from other countries. I'm bothered by it and find it unpleasant, even worrying. We refer to people from other countries as "aliens". I always think of aliens as peoples from other planets, not those from other countries. When did we lose that feeling of humanity?

Some of the bitterness is understandable. We the taxpayers pay for far too many lives. We make the medical care possible, we allow for services that should be for just the citizenry, not everyone. I don't agree with allowing non-citizens to apply for education scholarships. I don't want to pay for everyone who isn't paying into the same system. But then, I pay for the Americans who suck off the system with ten kids, no job or low income and I resent that, too. I need not target only people from 0ther countries for that.

I would certainly not hold it against anyone to come here for that better life. On the other hand, people come here for that better life immediately feel the anti-people feeling. Maybe that better life comes with a price, but this is the wrong price. And unless your name is Sitting Bull or White Feather or something Native American, you didn't start out here, either.

Any chance you are Comanche? Blackfoot? Maybe Leni Lenape? Hmmm. I suspected not. And maybe - maybe - you could make the argument that your forebears did the right thing and became citizens, but I bet when they first came here, that was not the first thing on their minds. The first thing?

Survival.

That is what all of us do. As individuals, as members of a household, a community, a city, a state, a national and of the world, we are all doing what we can to guarantee survival. We do it by working and buying what we need; earning money and sending it home; having children (just because I personally don't like kids and don't have any doesn't mean I don't get what the large underlying goal of having them is). Sometimes life is harder with the enormous amount of people we have and survival means the more basic elements: theft, committing crimes, killing others, hunting - things that we as a race have had to do to survive.

And now you hold it against others. You haven't had to steal, fight, kill, hunt to get what you need but you demean others for coming to the land of opportunity and doing what they need to survive as individuals. For helping their families, who can't come here to survive by sending money home. For looking out to keep their children safe and alive. Where do you get off with that attitude.

I do think there are other races - space-going races that come peek at us and think, "these guys haven't come nearly as far up the evolutionary ladder as needed for us to get to know them." I'd agree wholeheartedly. We aren't anywhere close to that point. We don't deserve to play with the species who don't torture their own, don't view themselves as the parts instead of the whole. The people who feel only a sense of nationality instead of being citizens of the world.

We haven't mastered it and we don't seem to be heading to that point as fast as we could. I won't say we aren't pointing in a better direction than before in history, but we are progressing much like a glacier - three feet forward, two feet back. Not the best way to do it.

The next time you want to make commentary on the other people who are just starting their lives here and bringing their cultures and norms here, look at your name. If it isn't along the lines of Eshkan, Mikinaak, Nesawaakwaad, Lapowinsa, than maybe you haven't earned the right to criticize. Your family maybe came here in the 1600s and what did they do? Kill the locals, keep their names (Native Americans don't have surnames), stomp on everyone else, and then down the road called themselves Americans and deride others for coming here now.

Keep it. If that is what it means to be an American, I'll call myself a Terran and be done with it.