The brutish and nasty reality of Arizona just keeps getting national prominence. Sunday's New York Times has this grim gem:
GILA BEND, Ariz. — Soon after Antonio Torres, a husky 19-year-old
farmworker, suffered catastrophic injuries in a car accident last June,
a Phoenix hospital began making plans for his repatriation to Mexico.
Mr. Torres was comatose and connected to a ventilator. He was also a
legal immigrant whose family lives and works in the purple alfalfa
fields of this southwestern town. But he was uninsured. So the hospital
disregarded the strenuous objections of his grief-stricken parents and
sent Mr. Torres on a four-hour journey over the California border into
Mexicali.
For days, Mr. Torres languished in a busy emergency room there, but
his parents, Jesús and Gloria Torres, were not about to give up on him.
Although many uninsured immigrants have been repatriated by American hospitals,
few have seen their journey take the U-turn that the Torreses
engineered for their son. They found a hospital in California willing
to treat him, loaded him into a donated ambulance and drove him back
into the United States as a potentially deadly infection raged through
his system.
By summer’s end, despite the grimmest of prognoses from the hospital
in Phoenix, Mr. Torres had not only survived but thrived. Newly
discharged from rehabilitation in California, he was haltingly walking,
talking and, hoisting his cane to his shoulder like a rifle, performing
a silent, comic, effortful imitation of a marching soldier.
“In Arizona, apparently, they see us as beasts of burden that can be
dumped back over the border when we have outlived our usefulness,” the
elder Mr. Torres, who is 47, said in Spanish. “But we outwitted them.
We were not going to let our son die. And look at him now!”
To repeat: Torres was in the country legally. His crime apparently was to have brown skin and no insurance.
One of the problems for a nation without a homogeneous population is the flaccid support for social democracy. Republicans have succeeded by telling the working class that they shouldn’t have to support others, particularly those who look different. Obama’s election is either an interruption of that strategy or a new discussion starter. Time will tell, but my suspicion is that our straitened circumstances will only exacerbate the war between the have somethings and the have nots. I can imagine a scenario where some new-generation Pat Buchanan tells Americans that Mexico’s economic unraveling is not our concern even though the repercussions are painful in places like Arizona.
Really, what do we do? If Americans are going to be suffering a severe contraction of affluence, what about Mexico? Will we militarize the border so starving hordes are prevented from crossing? Anyone who knows a Mexican immigrant personally understands this isn’t just an abstract concern. And anyone who lives next door to a white worker behind on his mortgage payments knows compassion for dark-skinned others is in short supply.
I should have linked to this in my Obama comment:
https://www.theonion.com/content/news/nation_finally_shitty_enough_to?utm_source=onion_rss_daily
Sounds like another lawsuit and we the taxpayers get to pay it off because our elected officials would rather posture than do the right thing. Judging from the margin of Joke Arpiao’s and CandyAss Thomas’ victories, the voters are getting what they want, not want they need.