¡Bendice, Señor Dios, América!

I got this announcement in my mail this evening. My own reply follows.

Please read!!

First of May is Shopping Day!!!

Illegal immigrants are planning a nationwide boycott of all goods and services on Monday, May 1st. They have marched in our streets and demanded rights as a reward for breaking our country's law. They hope to show that they have an impact on our economy, they hope to hurt American business, they hope to emotionally and economically blackmail us into submission.

So what! can we do? All Americans who support LEGAL immigration but demand that all immigrants RESPECT our law are asked to act on May 1st.

Wear RED or BLUE that day(They will be wearing white), and go SHOPPING.

If you have to grocery shop, make it May 1st. Need gas in your car? Fill it up May 1st. Buy Mother's Day gifts, buy summer clothes, buy whatever you need, but BUY THAT DAY.

American citizens outnumber illegal immigrants, and we MUST make ourselves heard. Wear red or blue to! show your pride in your country, and your opposition to weak border and amnesty legislation. And GO SHOPPING!

Let's make May 1st a day to remember, and remind Congress that the illegal immigrants they cower before can't vote. We can. And we will.

The First of May is Shopping Day!

FORWARD THIS TO SHOW YOUR PRIDE IN YOUR COUNTRY!!!!!

Forward this to everyone on your email list, at work, at school, your friends, your family. We CAN make ourselves heard. We CAN remind the politicians that WE are the ones that put them in office, and that it's OUR tax dollars they're squandering. Pass the word along and make your voice heard!

To read more on what the Illegal Immigrants plan to do on May lst. Go to:

http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/

Dear Friend,

Please don't send me this crap. Not ever. Those people you're complaining about love this country and they want to become productive citizens here. They want to build this country from the ground up and raise their children with the hope of the same American dream that pulled your ancestors out of the Russian Pale, the ghettos of mittleEuropa, the slums of Sicily, and the dead rotten farmfields of Ireland. Plenty of people thought that the Micks and Kikes and Niggers and Wops and Polacks and Chinks, and Bohunks and Canucks had no damned business stinking up their America, and did everything they could to keep them out.

But back then, if we wanted cheap labor for railroads or factories, or cannon-fodder right off the boats for the Civil War, or pickers for the California farms, we had to actually let people in and let them stay. Since then we've jiggered the laws: we've gotten better at letting people's labor and sweat in, without having to actually share the country with them. Good trick. Our companies have even figured out ways to let them pay their income tax and Social Security withholding under false numbers, so that they pay in money that they can never claim, free money for for the rest of us to enjoy. Hooray for us.

And back then they didn't just work and keep their mouths shut, either. Your immigrant great-grandparents were plenty political! The damned Polacks and the filthy Heebs and so on walked the lines and fought the Pinkertons and the cops and froze and died and won you the right to those weekends off from work, the right to bargain for your pay, and safety laws, so you could enjoy an expectation that your beloved family members weren't working in toxic unventilated death-traps.

Now these Spicks want to come join us Micks and Eye-ties and Kikes and Krauts and Ragheads and Japs, to become legal, to work as something better than slaves for illegal less-than-minimum pay. They're willing to work in your giant pesticide-poisoned vegetable factory-fields for less per day than you make in a half-hour, because they want their children to become English-speaking, college graduate Americans, just like your parents wanted for you!

Plenty of hoity-toity Bahstonians and NewYawkiz walked their city streets and when they heard the alien jabber of Yiddish Polish Italian Lithuanian Russian Chinese they hated it and they feared it. And now we put up the pictures of those street scenes with all the store signs in Grandma's language and we call them quaint. But if you go downtown and hear two supermarket checkout girls hablando a little Español, you figure the country's going to infierno (hell) in a cesta (hand-basket).

And now they want to express their presence here, and show each other that they're not alone, they're not tiny, and they choose to do it by what? Sit-down strikes and picket lines? By closing down major industries? No, that was your grandparents who did that. These people are going to try something more peaceful, and yet it might be the most radical thing an American can do these days: they're going to NOT GO SHOPPING! That's not exactly Sacco & Vanzetti territory, is it?

NOT SHOPPING? When did that get to be Un-American? Paul Revere and his pals threw a whole lot of tea into Boston Harbor because they wanted to make a point about NOT SHOPPING under the unfair rules of the English King. During World War II, we were all asked to NOT GO SHOPPING as often as possible. We even had stamps that we had to count and keep track of for when we did want to go shopping. We were at war, and we understood why we were at war, and the President asked the entire nation to SACRIFICE a lot of material comfort to support the country. Everybody. Now we're supposedly in a war, but most of us haven't had to sacrifice one damned thing, and our President's only advice when the trouble started was for everybody to GO SHOPPING!

Well, maybe if we all did a little NOT SHOPPING, we could all express our political desires and do the country some good. Hey, how about NOT SHOPPING for, Idunno, how about say, GASOLINE, for the first week in May? Or do you really think that it's only a COINCIDENCE that the Oil Companies are making the highest profits of any industry in history while you're paying Three Dollars per gallon at the pump? Maybe our immigrant neighbors could teach us a little bit about the True American Virtue of NOT SHOPPING.

Meanwhile all these uppity immigrants are picking your crops and slaughtering your cows and minding your kids for wages you wouldn't look at, oh and they're sending their kids to Afghanistan and Iraq, too.

They're even translating our National Anthem into their language, so that their parents and grandparents can understand it, too, so they can sing OUR SONG in the language their own hearts understand. And, oh boy! now people are pissed off about that, too?? They're not singing "Hooray for Nicaragua" or "The Mexican Eagle is Just Swell!" or "Puerto Rico, you lovely island..." -- they're singing about our Estrellas y Franjas (Stars and Stripes) proudly waving over the Land of the Free, because they LOVE this Country. How come when Mandy Pantinkin sings "Gott Bentsch America" in Yiddish, people get weepy and think it's sweet, but when a bunch of kids sing "¿No veis, a la luz de la aurora, Lo que tanto aclamamos la noche al caer?" we get all steamed up? (By the way, that's "Can't you see, by the light of dawn, what we cheered for as night fell?" which you might kinda recognize.)

So I'm glad these people are here: they're Americans by choice and not by accident, and they've come to help us make America as good a place as we've been bragging it was all along. It's about time.

So don't send me any more of that nativist crap. I heard it about the Jews and the Irish. I heard it about the Chinese. I heard it about the Poles and Swedes and Cape Verdeans. My God, I've been listening to it since the English started complaining about the filthy Dutch and Germans sometime in the 1600s and I'm way past tired of it. If you don't like people assembling peaceably to redress their grievances, then you go back to where you came from!