PITTSBURGH (TNS) — “If anyone wants to start working on midterms (which Democrats need to already be thinking about honestly),” wrote a friend who lives in rural southern Texas, “they need to start booking flights to border towns and showing up in coffee shops and bars and listening to people about the reality of the border.”
She explained: “As someone who lives surrounded by people here illegally who are hostile to me and my family, I can tell you that the whole ‘they are just looking for a better life’ line wears off pretty fast when it’s your life.”
She objects to the erasure that comes with the simple line that Americans won’t do the jobs immigrants do.
”My grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all worked in fields as migrant workers and they were American. There were times when they lost jobs because someone here illegally would do the job cheaper. So when you say Americans won’t do those jobs, there are Americans who have and are still doing them.”
Before you blow a gasket, Leticia Ochoa Adams is a person of color, whose ancestors lived in Texas before Texas was taken from Mexico, who describes herself as “a bleeding heart leftist.” She hopes people listen to Bernie Sanders’ remarks on this election (as do I), because then “we could actually create a thriving country.”
I’ve known her for many years and know how much she hates injustice against the vulnerable, and has sometimes sacrificed the good will of influential people to speak out against it. She hates it partly because she knows it well, as a brown person from an ethnic minority who grew up financially struggling.
In this case, she said something un-leftist, which many of us don’t want to hear. I prefer the most liberal immigration narrative, that America should give the undocumented every advantage. But then it’s easy for me to say that because it doesn’t affect my life, living in north Allegheny County and not having to worry that an undocumented person will take my job.
And Leticia said it with a personal authority. She knows a situation that we here in Western Pennsylvania for the most part know only from other people’s stories.
That’s an important difference — and one that helps explain why we’re in the mess we’re in.
We know what we know about the wider world solely from stories, and stories mediated to us not only by the press, but maybe even more by activists and politicians, three groups that range widely not only in their biases but in their commitment to trying to tell the truth. (Look at the appalling Republican commercials.)
Our sources are hard to read. And we don’t necessarily read well. The stories we get, we naturally tend to believe or disbelieve based on who we are. Lots of things affect what we think we see.
Among them: our own political commitments, prejudices (for and against, positive and negative), the friends and others we most want to agree with, group identities, social class, the places we live and the people we know, what mom and dad taught us before we were old enough to know better, our sense of self-interest, favored sources of information and opinion, personal experiences, and some days our caffeination and blood sugar levels.
HOW DO WE KNOW?
In other words, we are not infallible judges of what’s going on. Too many people feel too certain that they know exactly what’s what. How do we know who’s right when people disagree? When we can’t know whose stories to trust and must question our own reading of the stories we hear? (I trust Leticia, but there’s no compelling reason for you to. It’s just another story you’re reading in the press.)
There is no good way to know. We have no formula into which we can plug Leticia’s view, and the New York Times’ view, and the views of activists and politicians, and the latest academic studies, and know we’ll get the truth. That’s just the human condition.
That’s why we have the political system we do, built on the hope that all these very different people engaged together in our public life will make life better for everyone. Which it has, mostly, sort of, in spurts and stages, in any case better than the alternative.
One thing I do know. Any hope of understanding the world better requires taking seriously, and genuinely listening to, people we don’t take seriously, that we feel we shouldn’t take seriously.
When I’ve written (as I did last week and in April) about my friends at our townie bar, people I like and respect a great deal, whose opinions of things I take seriously, some readers have reacted with contempt, and some with what feels like rage.
My friends are mostly white, mostly working class, and many and perhaps most voted for Donald Trump, therefore (some people think) people to be despised sight unseen. They’re the one group a certain kind of liberal feels safe in rejecting as a group.
What they’d never say about a racial, ethnic, sexual or national minority, they’ll say about the people gathered round the bar at my local place.
WHAT THEY’D LEARN
They would do well to listen to such people, trying to respect them at least enough to understand them. They’d learn something useful about the world if they did, something they wouldn’t see on their own, something that would at least improve their political judgment.
They’d also see how other people’s lives make sense to them. They might even make friends.
As Leticia said, “Real change is going to come from the ground up, not with protests and hashtags. The hard hard work of getting offline and talking to people face to face.”
