Whether it’s Africa for African-Americans, Mexico, Central and South American for Latino US citizens and naturalized citizens, China for Chinese refugees who fled to the US, or any group, ANY group, we’ve all heard someone say it, or else been the recipient who it was aimed at: Go home, you $^#% immigrant. Go home if you dont like it here. Go home if you cant look like me. Go home if you’re smarter, faster than me. Go home if you think you’re going to tell me what to do/ compete with me/ go to my schools/ take up space/ take resources, breathe the same air, have a say so in my country.
Go back where you came from you #$%#. Everyone, Italians, Jews, the Irish, currently some of the Brits, the Muslims, the Catholics. Everyone has been attacked this way.
Rabbi David Nesenoff making a film for his website RabbiTV where he says he thinks videos are the new lingua franca of the realm. Whether his film was pre-planned is unclear at this time.
David Nesenoff: “They should just go back to Poland and Germany?”
Helen Thomas: “And America and everywhere else.”
Do you know how many times I and my immigrant and refugee family have been told in our lives to ‘go back to where we came from?’– which would be a long-ago place where a slaying of the innocents of every religion and politic had taken place, where an enslaving set of armies didnt care at all if they caught the poor and unarmed in their conquests, occupations, rapes, starvations, maimings, and murderous wars?
Likely you dont know, and I would be glad for you if you didnt know because ‘Go back where the hell you came from’ is usually delivered in a hate-filled raised-lip snarl or in a cold ice dagger of loathing. But you would have heard this many times if you too are a child of an immigrant/ refugee, or one yourself.
Especially if you were not born to the middle or upper class… and especially if you lived in a larger city, did the skut work for others, and had daily public exposure to the greater culture, rather than living in a protected environ, especially if your English was heavily accented. Then you would know the raw and unspeakably evil side of a certain portion of humanity when they are not at their best. ‘Go back where you came from’ is almost like the Kyrie at Mass, a chant, a very very familiar one.
But even with decades of ‘go back where you came from,’ thrown about in offhand remarks and sometimes with true lifelong embedded malice, even when prominent people have said such things in public, as Helen Thomas seemed to indicate in days past… the curious thing to me, is we who have received the brunt of such things directly, first person, don’t call press conferences because someone said we havent/ didnt/ wont/ do what they think is right in terms of our heritage, our religion, our memories, or our own hopefully ever expanding world view.
We don’t go to their places of work to raise a ruckus until those who employ them cant take the heat any longer, fear for loss of their own profits, fear offending their clients, and fire the ‘go back where you came from’ person.
We don’t. Instead we go on, in the best way we can, in the ways we think right and just, knowing that all will not agree with our ways of seeing now or in the past. And not always, but most often, we forgive those who say things that seem so cold like ‘go live in a place where you are sure to die,’ because we know they have not likely walked in our shoes in ‘the go back’ place.
And, because many of us sense too, knowing far more of the history of many nations than any previous generations have ever been priviledged to know– that somewhere in every person’s heritage, everyone’s ancestors have been or are still being over-run, enslaved and murdered.
We also know that memory of murderous times in every heritage group, especially, are carried and handed down as what I call ‘the generational wound’ to all generations born long, long afterwards. Thus, it can seem as though what happened long ago still walks fully alive on long legs in the present.
Old documented memories, and even modern amplifications of vague memories, can sometimes prompt us to take up sides in blood feuds, or add fuel to them… It is not the better part of us, but some human beings carry a portion of unconscious desire to avenge the hideous misdeeds of times past. And countervalently, many of us carry as much desire to be done with ‘take back,’ let alone ‘why dont you go back…’ We are often caught between two strong impulses.
Some people think peacemaking comes from the living, but as much, peacemaking comes from laying the avenging ghosts of the past to true rest.
And yet, here we are all of us worldwide, living where we live, and having a choice of attitude toward our bloody histories and our present realities. We can raise a vortex to flex our muscles and annhiliate someone or something, or we can find another set of ways. It’s a choice.
Thus far, I know what mine is and I have struggled to come to a world view that is not avenging and yet is respectful of our family’s history, of all families’ histories… and Creator willing, I ever hope I will be about: Trying to understand larger instead of smaller about all people.
To hold out for those who convene and engage peace, those who have a stake in not repeating the past but acutely learning from it so the past never need be or be allowed to be repeated.
To say it briefly: To learn to live and let live.
Simple credo. Hard to do.
But possible.
Very very possible. Day by day. In as much paradigm-shift consciousness as possible for the future; while tikkun olam, mending up today the world soul as much as possible; and with respeto, clear seeing and somber respect for the past. Akh and akht, brother and sister. Not enemies.