“Immigrants, We Get The Job Done”
From the Broadway hit HAMILTON
Our father was the quintessential man of his times – member of The Greatest Generation, salesman, man of family and faith. I don’t think we ever heard him utter anything stronger than “damn.” His greatest insult: “Too stupid to come in out of the rain.”
Recognizing that hate based on race, culture or nationality is learned, I’ve struggled to find a word other than “stupid” for many of today’s haters. The best I can come up with is “fool.”
“Any fool knows that bravado is always a cover-up for insecurity.
That’s the truth….”
Bobby Darin
It’s amazing how many folks – famous, not-famous and infamous – have proclaimed God’s love for fools and drunks.
Strangely, we can’t seem to find scriptural declarations of God’s love for drunken haters.
But wait!
A 45-year-old New Jersey man may soon cite God’s ineffable love for drunks and fools as justification for his ineloquent hatred. He’s already used the “I was drunk” justification for kicking off July 4th holiday with a vitriolic attack on his neighbors – an interracial senior citizen couple.
Unfortunately for him, when the word-limited gentleman with the half-moon stomach attempted to intimidate and threaten his Mount Laurel neighbors, he became a social media phenom.
"I did not mean this. It was a lapse of judgment… my anger got the best of me," he told an ABC television affiliate. "I cannot apologize enough. I was drunk," he told another network affiliate, attempting to justify his Friday afternoon spitting, stomach-bumping, verbal assaults.
But the vulgarian’s “I was drunk” excuse fell apart as others from the community reported similar antics dating to at least 2017. By Monday, he was hauled from his home in handcuffs – charged with three hate crimes, two crimes of harassment, and one of trespassing related to the viral video, as well as a separate incident with another female neighbor in which he is caught on video using slurs and performing a “lewd motion while laughing.” Local media report that, after his Monday, July 5 arrest, he would be remain in custody until his first court hearing on four days later.
In 1881 and 1883 – during peace time, Robert Augustus Sweeney twice jumped into the dangerous waters to save shipmates who had fallen overboard; he holds the distinction of being among only nineteen men to be awarded the Medal of Honor twice and one of eighty-seven African Americans to receive the Medal. Racial prejudice prevented the recognition of the courage of a significant number of Black Americans. On January 13 1997, President Bill Clinton awarded the Medal to seven African American World War II veterans; of these, only Vernon Baker was still alive.
During the same Fourth of July weekend in which the “I was drinking” man attacked his Black neighbors, a citizen of Orchard Lake, Michigan verbally assailed his second and third generation Lebanese-American neighbors, calling them “Arabs” and telling them “Go back to Iraq.” A perfecta of ignorance: The first Lebanese immigration to the United States began in the late 1870s and the majority of Lebanese in the United States are Christians – belonging to Maronite, Melkite, Eastern Orthodox and Greek Orthodox Catholic churches – and certainly not from Iraq.
Navy Seal Michael Anthony Monsoor
United States Navy SEAL Michael Anthony Monsoor was of Lebanese/Irish descent. On September 29, 2006 in Ramadi, Iraq, Monsoor smothered an insurgent grenade with his body, absorbing the explosion and saving his squad members from serious injury and death. On April 8, 2008, President George W. Bush posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor to his parents.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups….
Think of how stupid the average person is, and
realize that half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin
On Friday night August 11, 2017, a mob of white nationalists, white supremacists and neo-Nazis carrying Tiki torches paraded through the Charlottesville campus of the University of Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil” – a Nazi slogan meant to emphasize racial purity.
Benjamin Levy
Benjamin B. Levy of the 1st New York Volunteer infantry was the very first recipient of the Medal of Honor for his service at the Battle of Glendale on June 30 1862. This seventeen-year-old Jewish boy’s Medal citation read: “This soldier, a drummer boy, took the gun of a sick comrade, went into the fight, and when the color bearers were shot down, carried the colors and saved them from capture.”
David Orbansky received his Medal for his 1863 actions during the Civil War. In 2005 Holocaust survivor Tibor “Ted” Rubin received his for heroism in the Korean War fifty-five years earlier; his courage had been “overlooked” due to anti-Semitic prejudice.
“When I came to America, it was the first time I was free.
It was one of the reasons I joined the U.S. Army because
I wanted to show my appreciation….
I figured I was a goner. But I ran from one foxhole to the next,
throwing hand grenades so the North Koreans
would think they were fighting more than one person.”
Tibor Rubin
Tibor Rubin
Despite having been severely wounded in battle and taken prisoner by Communist forces, when offered an early release, Rubin declined and continued to risk his life by sneaking out of prison at night and breaking into enemy food stores and gardens to find food and to provide medical care to his fellow sick and wounded prisoners.
Levy, Orbansky and Rubin are among the more than fifteen Jewish Americans to receive the nation’s highest honor.
With the early onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (the 19 reflects the year in which it was first identified – 2019), attacks on Asian Americas spiked 1,900 percent in New York City in 2020 and the violence has continued nationwide into 2021. Anti-Asian xenophobia is deeply rooted in decades of discriminatory and biased American public health and immigration policies and, today, is tied both to the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic and political rise of China.
The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which prevented Chinese laborers from emigrating to the U.S., was the first American immigration law that excluded an entire ethnic group. Between 1910 and 1940 more than 225,000 Chinese and Japanese immigrants were detained for as long as six months in the oppressive conditions of the Angel Island immigration station. Public health officials misrepresented Asians as diseased carriers of incurable afflictions, like smallpox and bubonic plague, as a justification for anti-immigrant policies and to drum up hysteria against Asian immigrants, who were presented as a threat to white American jobs.
While 127,000 members of their families languished in internment camps in California, Washington and Oregon, Japanese-American soldiers demonstrated outstanding courage in Europe during World War II.
The wave of anti-Asian violence and vitriol ignores Jose B. Nisperos, a member of the U.S. Army’s 34th Company of the Philippines and the first Asian American to receive the Medal of Honor - for his service in the Philippine-American War (1899 – 1902). Filipino Navy Fireman Second Class Telesforo Trinidad, who served in both world wars, was awarded the Medal in recognition of his courage saving the lives of several shipmates following an explosion about the USS San Diego in 1915.
By the end of World War II only two Asian-Americans were awarded the nation’s highest honor for valor. Then, in a White House ceremony on June 21, 2000 President Bill Clinton awarded the Medal to 22 Asian-American WW II vets. Japanese American Hiroshi H. Miyamura was honored for his service in the Korean War and third-generation Japanese-Americans Terry Teruo Kawamura and Rodney Jamus Takahashi Yano and Hispanic/Asian-Pacific American Elmelindo Rodrigues Smith were all honored for their heroism during the Viet Nam war.
Hiroshi Miyamura
Since the American Civil War, the nation’s highest military decoration has been presented to citizens and non-citizens born in almost every European nation and Barbados, Mexico, Bohemia, Serbia, Croatia, the Ottoman Empire, China, Slovakia, Montenegro, India, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Malta, Russia, Cuba, and the West Indies
With 1.9 billion adherents, Islam is the second largest religion in the world – 1.5 billion Sunnis and 240-340 million Shia; Indonesia – certainly not an Arab nation – is the largest Muslim country in the world, followed by Afghanistan and Pakistan – neither is an Arab nation.
Hatred based simply on mistaken ideas about religion or race is – at best – foolish and - at worst – just plain stupid. It reflects a profound – sometimes deliberate – unknowing of history. Mauritania, Somalia, Tunisia, Afghanistan and Iran (which is Persian and not Arab) have the highest Muslim populations in the world – all above 99 percent.
Yusef Ben Ali, an Arab of North African descent, was among the Muslims who served in George Washington’s Army and, during the first world war, the name Muhammad was so common that it was spelled forty-one ways in military records with soldiers tracing their origins to Afghanistan, Algeria, the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, Turkey and Yemen.
But haters probably don’t know that.
There’s a problem with foolish hating – you don’t hate just once. Eventually the virus of hatred spreads throughout the body, infects and, then, kills the soul.
Let’s put aside the moral or religious dynamic of hate and first ask “Does hatred pass the fool and drunk tests?” Certainly not. Foolish and drunk are transient – jumping off a balcony and missing the pool is sophomoric (“Sophomore” - from the Greek for “wise fool.”) and will probably leave you with a hefty Emergency Room bill. Eventually, “drunk” is slept off, although it may be quickly resurrected.
Unreflected upon and long-term hating – reflected in killing Sikhs and calling them Muslims and Arabs or the erroneous belief that all Arabs are Muslims and all Muslims are Arabs – is stupid.
Stupid is telling second and third generation Lebanese Americans to go back to Iraq without knowing that the vast majority of Lebanese in the US are Melkite or Maronite or Greek Orthodox or Eastern Orthodox Catholics.
Despite the popular myth, Abraham Lincoln didn’t dash off a few ideas aboard a train before delivering the Gettysburg Address on June 1, 1865. There are five known copies of the speech in Lincoln’s handwriting. On display in the Lincoln Room of the White House is the “Bliss Copy,” written, signed and dated by Lincoln; its text is reproduced on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task
remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take
increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the
last full measure of devotion – that we here highly
resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain –
that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom –
and the government of the people, by the people, for the people,
shall not perish from the earth.
Were he alive today, Lincoln would remind the spewers of ignorant hatred of these heroes who “gave the last full measure of devotion… that this nation, under God… shall not perish from the earth.”
Lincoln would hear the folly of ignorant hatred and sadly shake his head.