Timeless
July 22nd, 2008 at 1:02 pm (Books)
I’m re-reading Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising Sequence and am finally on the last book, Silver on the Tree. I’ve come to a bit where a man is talking to the main character’s family about a bullying his son participated in a few days before. This all takes place in the U.K. and the book was written in 1977. The target of the bullying is a Sikh boy. This father is going on about those Pakistani and Indian people and how they’re take jobs from honest Englishmen, live 16 to a house, and take advantage of the national healthcare system. It’s funny (not the ha-ha sort of funny, either) that this is such a precise parallel of the sort of attitude we see here in the U.S. today, especially in CA and the southwest, regarding the Mexican immigrant workers. I guess that sort of ignorance and stupidity is timeless.
Primal said,
July 23rd, 2008 at 1:38 pm
You hear the same sort of comments around here as well. Mostly the people who make them are the people who don’t take the time to get to know the people they’re speaking of so harshly. The majority of the immigrant workers I personally have come into contact with are hard workers who send most of their money back home to support their families. They don’t cause trouble, and they don’t want trouble.
As for taking jobs away from American (or English in the case of Ms Cooper’s book) workers, the jobs wouldn’t be there to take if Americans wanted them badly enough.