may day.

as i was driving home this afternoon, i was listening to NPR. all things considered. a pretty normal monday afternoon scenario. i started thinking about may day for some reason. may day, the british bank holiday…pretty little girls weaving pretty little ribbons around tall poles in acts of pretty useless prettiness. but then there’s also may day, the cry for help. the voice on the other end of the radio…the one coming from the end of the line where the plane is crashing or the ship is sinking.

the pieces that i listened to were mostly about the demonstrations that happened today in favor of various types of immigration reform — there were the latino immigrants who favor opening the borders, legalizing those who are already here illegally…a big rah-rah fest about the contributions that illegal immigrants make to US society. there were also the counter protestors. the ones who think that we should police our borders and deport the illegals and sit up in the closet with a flashlight late at night.

it struck me that the voices i heard — no matter which “side” they were on — were no more than acts of useless prettiness. i didn’t hear any of the may day signal that has been beeping through my brain for the weeks leading up to this pretty mess.

today, i’m pretty convinced that our world has cancer, or some other kind of festering, malignant dis-ease. sadly, that isn’t our real problem. the real problem is that world leaders — and especially the leaders of our country — see mounting symptoms, but instead of putting it all together into a coherent diagnosis, they put a band-aid on an open sore here, give us two aspirin for the pain inside and send the world on its way, each day closer to falling apart. call us in the morning.

this real problem manifests itself in a lot of ways, but none more poignant to me than this immigration business.

people are going to do what needs to be done to keep their families healthy and safe. no border in the world, short of our very own rio-grande-berlin-wall would keep illegal immigrants in mexico and out of the strawberry fields, construction sites and kitchens of america.

until we start asking WHY people, millions and millions of people, are willing to risk their lives and their life’s savings on a dangerous trip that takes them far from their families to do often dangerous work while living in a one bedroom apartment with 20 other men in the same situation, there will be illegal immigration. lots of it.

border patrol, deportation, refusing social services…these are putting band-aids on a gun shot wound.

and no one seems to get it. the pretty useless voices talk about how hard-working immigrants are, how immigrants drag down wages, how we should or should not sing the national anthem. but no one’s talking about why they come here. why they risk it. why exactly mexico sucks so damned much that they risk everything for the chance to clean some gringo’s toilet or dig some rich man’s ditch.

of course, i don’t have any answers. i have no real idea about how to improve the mexican economy or how the US’s sorry excuse for a foreign policy could be improved, beyond a vague feeling that if we stopped subsidizing americans to grow crops that would be more efficiently produced elsewhere, agricultural markets worldwide would be more fair and fewer people would be starving.

i do, however, have questions. and the biggest one, the one right at the front of my brain is this — do the powers-that-be really want to end or slow illegal immigration? one thing that karl marx got right all those years ago was that capitalism requires a reserve army of labor. an army of capable workers who are available to rise up and fill jobs when crises arise. here in america, it used to be women (remember rosie the riveter?), now, it’s mexicans and other latin american immigrants.

there is more to this debate than pretty useless talking, rahrahing and isolationism. this may day, it’s time to cut the crap and figure out what it’s really about.