Sit on the floor

If you were a good singer, you were a "canary."  Mediocre singer?  A "bluebird."  If you couldn't carry a tune, you were a pitiful "crow."  Canaries sat near the back of our circle of chairs, bluebirds up closer where the teacher could keep an eye on them.  The crows sat on the floor.

These were the rules in first grade,  during our half-hour music period.  A meritocracy, preparing us for the horrors of college applications, I suppose. 

But there was a twist.  If a canary or bluebird misbehaved, he was temporarily demoted to a crow.  He sat on the floor among the riffraff.  We learned the lesson well.  Being a bad singer and a bad person were equivalent.  Some of us were born to endless night, but others sometimes descended to those same Stygian depths through their own misbehavior.

I often think of this little parable when I observe the quirks of American society.  I think of it now as I watch our national debate on immigration.

I don't view immigration, documented or undocumented, from an absolutist point of view.  I understand why it may be impossible, or at least undesirable, to simply open our borders -- to open them as we did in the nineteenth century, back when we were a land that was still, in part, an unpopulated wilderness.

But I see the other side as well.

We are a wealthy country.  Yes, we have poverty, but anyone who has visited the third world understands that even the poorest American would be a man of wealth in many societies.  And studies show that those of us who are most bitterly opposed to immigration are not among our poorest citizens.  Our poorest citizens are too busy just living from day to day to sit around writing diatribes on internet news sites.

We are wealthy, but our wealth is like the singing ability of my classroom's "canaries."  It comes to us by luck -- or, if you are so inclined, by grace.  We are Americans -- moreover, middle class Americans -- by birth or by a combination of luck and certain efforts by our ancestors.  Almost all of us are little versions of Donald Trump -- yes, we've worked to make ourselves middle class, but we started out with unearned capital  -- social background, education, and family wealth that we perhaps multiplied by our efforts.  If we aren't, like some, just living off the capital that we've received.

Our nation, too, enjoyed incredible luck by being formed in an empty and fertile land, a land our people occupied for many decades without worries of defense or economic competition -- simply because we were so geographically isolated during a time when travel and communication were slow and undependable.

We should be exceedingly thankful for the luck -- or grace -- that provided such great advantages to both our nation and to ourselves as individuals.  And many of us are.

But that thankfulness should include an ability to see that nothing differentiates us as a human being from a resident of the Congo or El Salvador or Bangladesh -- nothing other than good luck.  Those people have similar hopes and dreams of their own, modified only by their local experiences.  Each of them, like Shylock in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, could ask us his version of that unfortunate Jew's speech:

 Hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same
food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,
heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter
and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If
you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?

When we see a caravan of Central Americans heading toward our border -- filled not with bandits, murderers, and other desperadoes as President Trump pretends to believe, but with impoverished and persecuted men, women, and children -- how can we avoid imagining ourselves in their place?  How can we treat them -- people so much like ourselves -- as vermin to be eradicated lest they infect our own precious country.  How can we fail to appreciate that wave after wave of similarly impoverished peoples, including our own ancestors, once came to this country, themselves looking for relief from misery, both economic and political, and are now our fellow citizens?

Maybe we can't let them all in.  Maybe if we're too welcoming to the first wave, we'll soon be facing a clamor from the entire world for admission.  But if we turn any back, we should see them as they are, and feel compassion for their pain.  And even if  convinced that we cannot at this time receive them, we should feel guilt.

Because we were born to sweet delight, through no merit of our own.  And they were born to endless night, through no fault of theirs.  And we've done little or nothing to earn the right to judge their merits as future citizens, and we've done relatively little or nothing to help improve their lot in their own countries.

Because in real life, as opposed to first grade music classes, no one is born a crow.  We are all canaries.   But most canaries spend their lives sitting on the floor like crows, because certain privileged canaries insist there aren't enough chairs for them. Or pretend that they are treated like crows because they deserve to be crows. 

If we are short of chairs, we might build some more chairs, rather than walls.

And President Trump should be ashamed, deeply ashamed, at begging us to think otherwise, and for building his career on the prejudice of those of us who have been given so much, whether we realize it or not.