estoy muy enojada!
I'm feeling outraged—disgusted too, for that matter.
One of the things I love about where I live is the diversity. Interestingly similar to my neighborhood in Chicago, there are many Spanish-speaking families that live in the area, and I love it. It's endearing when people come into our store for the first time and have some challenges with our unique lingo, and I am only too happy to do some basic translation from English to Spanish to help our customers order what they want. It's equally cool to see the many Ethiopian, Somali and Arab customers who frequent our little coffee shop. If anyone ever had a doubt, “cappuccino” is definitely the universal language.
But there are people—LOTS of people, apparently—who live in the Nashville area who don't feel as warm and fuzzy as I do about our diversity—diversity that is an inevitable reality for a country that has always prided itself on being a “melting pot” and the “land of the free.” And quite honestly, I am truly heartbroken about some of the buzz happening in the Nashville metropolitan area these days.
We have a city Councilman who wants to require the city to conduct all its business in English and prohibit offering services or information to its citizens in any other language. Wow. Yeah. Ok. The purpose being that it will encourage non-English speakers to learn the language. Um, ok. Yeah. Right.
And then there is Lewisburg—a little town in which some citizens loudly (and obnoxiously, in my opinion) made a fuss over some “foreign language” books being purchased by the local library. To be clear, $130 of the library’s $13,000 budget was used to purchase books in Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Polish, and French. I can see why some people were upset—that could break the bank! (The silver lining: tons of books in other languages were subsequently donated to the library. Cool!)
The cherry on top is an electronic billboard along I-40 that for a while had this message on it:
“Metro Council, welcome to America, we speak English here. Pass the bill. Immigrants, no habla Ingles? No freeo stuffo, from el governmento, comprende por favor?”
Gross! Unacceptable! Outrageous! And I’ve got a lot of other choice words that will not be posted here because I try to keep it PG. But, wow! Wow. Sad.
I am not even going to touch the whole immigration debate that seems to have become a central issue for the mid-term elections this year. I am not going to point out that everyone who lives in the United States today who is not of American Indian origin is an immigrant or a descendant of one. That’s a much more complex and broad-reaching issue than I have the energy to address right now.
Let me just say that for the first time I do not like living where I live—specifically and generally. I have endeavored sincerely to shield my heart from all the negative stereotypes people offered freely when they found out I was moving to “the South”—stereotypes about how ignorant or backwards Southerners can be, stereotypes that I still refuse to apply to people around me and myself. And I believe with all my being that people are people and we are all equal.
It’s just that all of a sudden, I feel like I’m living in a very intolerant and ignorant environment. I will own that these are judgments on my part, and I am fully aware of the fact that not every “volunteer” is intolerant and ignorant. But really, today is the first time I felt strongly about not putting down deep roots in Tennessee. Maybe not even in the 48 contiguous states. Who knows? I am, of course, open to all the possibilities life has to offer. The more I think about my future—as an individual, as a wife and mother (hopefully one day – don’t get any ideas!), as a globally minded person—the more I see my future somewhere other than Tennessee and quite possibly somewhere other than the States.
And let me also state for the record that I feel strongly that one benefits from learning the primary or prevalent language spoken in a country to which they may move. If I moved to China, I fully expect I would work hard at learning Mandarin and perhaps the dialect of whatever region in which I find myself. So, yeah—I think people living in the States need to learn English. But it doesn’t happen overnight! And the more welcoming and open we can be, I suspect the more encouraged people will feel to learn English. I can’t imagine there’s much incentive to learn a language for the purpose of speaking with people who communicate loudly and clearly their disinterest in having you living near them.
People are often surprised by the fact that I like country music. Yeah, I do. In fact, there is a song I really like by the band Little Big Town called “Boondocks”. And there was a sweet and moving moment I experienced months ago involving that song. There was something about that moment, something that made the oneness of humanity so clear in my heart—again—and something that urgently reminded me about the importance of opening our hearts to people who may seem so different from us on the surface but who are having the exact same human experience we are having. I feel utter joy in those fleeting yet palpable moments when I just get it—I get the fact that we’re all the same, I feel it in my veins, I breathe it into my being. We are all imperfect yet glorious, we all take pride in our heritage and are headed toward the same future, we are corporeal and spiritual beings, and we are all profoundly insignificant in the greater scheme of the universe yet so precious and spectacular.