One of my favorite poems is Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”
The poem speaks to the plight of the farmer on his little plot of land who works for his daily bread. The lines that are pertinent to this post are:
Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire,
Hands, that the rod of empire might have swayed,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.
But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll;
Chill Penury repressed their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul
These high school students the sons and daughters of immigrants deprived of a chance to live in America very well may not have had the opportunity to achieve the level of knowledge they gained. Like most immigrants from Eastern Europe during the great wave of immigration that took place around the end of the 19th century their parents were ill-educated, non-English speaking immigrants, who came here poor and desperate. They were desperate to escape from the land of their birth; desperate to give their children the offerings in America.
They marveled at the opportunity to attend public schools just because they were in America. They worked hard in the lowest levels of the economy so their children could have a better life. Many of their children achieved and appreciated the opportunity America gave them; but now that America is fostering hostility to immigrants. The big question is how long will the sons and daughters of immigrants who arrived over the last two decades maintain their appreciation? How long before they think they’d be better off in a country like China that actively encourages sciences and lacks the open racism we see in America?
I noted 97 Americans have won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. The first American woman who won was Gerty Theresa Radnitz, known as Gerty Cori, who was born to a Jewish family in Prague and immigrated to the United States. A quick glance at the list of Americans who won the Nobel Prizes in other fields such as Chemistry and Physics show many are sons or daughters of immigrants and others came here to engage in higher education and stayed. Reading about them one is struck with how many others from other countries who have come to America supported and aided the Americans who also gained remarkable achievements. The inflow of immigrants whose descendants have achieved to the best of their abilities in a free society that encourages science is what has made America great.
Unfortunately our country under the Trump administration is giving us a double whammy: it is hostile not only to immigrants but also to science. It is as we are becoming the country of Luddites. The Trump Administration proposed deep cuts in science spending. It is supported by the believers in the absurdity of Creationism, the rising obtuse QAnon group, the imaginary Deep State that controls the country even though those in control are Republicans, and the many number of his followers who believe climate change is a hoax as island nations start disappearing and Europe breaks another heat wave record. All are comforted by their president who tells them not to believe what they see or read.
Fortunately, there still remain enough people in Congress to understand that science and immigrants are essential to our country’s future. Despite the Freedom Coalition, Congress went ahead and passed as part of the budget big spending increases for science.
Yet we have to wonder where we are going with a president who doesn’t read, abhors science, and disdains immigrants. What will happen to our country when the president says:“The Fake News hates me saying that they are the Enemy of the People only because they know it’s TRUE. I am providing a great service by explaining this to the American People. They purposely cause great division & distrust. They can also cause War! They are very dangerous & sick!”
Trump says his great service is telling his people the media is an enemy of the people. The First Amendment guaranteed freedom of the press. The Founders of the country knew its value; Trump wants to suppress it. Students of fascism and communism well understand where that talk leads. Future scientists and successful immigrants can also discern the hate and evil in his words. How long will they want to call America home when it produces people like Trump and his hateful followers?
” At the end of the day the President can take the Fifth. He doesn’t have to testify. ”
Carmen Ortiz on Jim Braude’s GREATER BOSTON discussing Mueller end game and the nuances involved in a Presidential subpoena.
Her Honor, Carmen Ortiz ?!?
She is robed in possibilities !!!
E.Freeh:
Bolo with right . Stick with the left. Chop Chop . To the Ever Linguistic Bolo Puncher !!!
* ” The greatest liar I have met in journalism. ”
Muggeridge on Walter Duranty.
What socialist utopia are you talking about Wally-ha-ha ???
Leave It To Beaver, Stan !!!
JESUS REDISCOVERED … Malcolm Muggeridge
Muggeridge’s bio of Bill C. is a skylarking spiritual pilgrimage you just … gotta …. read.
CHRONICLES OF WASTED TIME … Malcolm Muggeridge. Ukrainian famine 1933 …. Called NYT Walter Duranty …. Who ardently defended Commies’ account … ” The greatest liar I have ever known.”
Relatively unknown, underread and unappreciated.
The US still has the most open and liberal laws on immigration in the world. You can become a citizen in the US; you cannot in Mexico, as example. Ever.
Since 2000, legal immigrants to the United States number approximately 1,000,000 per year, of whom about 600,000 are Change of Status who already are in the U.S.
Legal immigrants to the United States now are at their highest level ever, at just over 37,000,000 legal immigrants.
Despite the current stories about immigration, the current laws are basically the result of Ted Kennedy’s bills beginning in 1965.
“1986: Amnesty
In the campaign for the 1986 amnesty law, Kennedy predicted that the law would grant citizenship to no more than 1.3 million people. “We will secure the borders henceforth. We will never again bring forward another amnesty bill like this,” he said.
But by 2007, the number of people in the country illegally had jumped to more than 12 million.”
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2009/0828/kennedy-and-immigration-he-changed-the-face-of-america
Matt, allow me to suggest that what made this country great is an idea, embodied in the Declaration of Independence, and in the US Constitution.
Allow me to suggest that what you have written is not only ridiculous, it is an insult to people like George Washington Carver and Thomas Edison and many, many others, who managed to operate without government grants, and didn’t have to worry about “deep cuts in science.”
If you are going to get on the TDS bandwagon, at least put on your lawyer hat and stick to some facts.
And your fiction also goes against the grain of the current PC fashion, which is that one is supposed to trash everything that is Eurocentric, along with other monsters du jour of lefties (plastic straws, anyone?).
Well, except for European Jews – they get a free pass on everything – wouldn’t want to be “anti-Semitic”, after all.
Fake News is an enemy of the people, and Trump is absolutely right on that.
“Well, except for European Jews – they get a free pass on everything – wouldn’t want to be “anti-Semitic”, after all.”
Don’t give it a thought.
Elmer is correct. There are special provisions for Eastern European Jews (mainly Russian) to enter the US, beginning with Nixon.
“However, on October 1, 1971, Attorney General John Mitchell
announced a new policy allowing Soviet Jews to enter the United
States by parole. Mitchell welcomed the first four immigrants to
benefit from this policy on January 7, 1972.”
At least 200,000 Jews have entered the US from Russia and it became a problem for Israel:
“On February 18, 1987, Israeli Prime Minister
Yitzchak Shamir requested of Secretary of State Shultz that the
United States not grant refugee status to Soviet Jewish emigrants.
Shamir stated that since the emigrants were leaving the Soviet
Union on Israeli visas they were no longer refugees.”
A full study of the history is available at:
https://digitalcommons.tourolaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1563&context=lawreview
I know Elmer is right. His cut was improperly placed.
Nice piece of fiction you wrote there, Matt, all the way around.
On a history of immigration that never happened, and on what Trump and his “hateful followers” supposedly want.
Waxing eloquent upon false assumption after false assumption, and false fact after false fact.
It’s like Lake Woebegone, except for immigrants, where they are all Nobel Prize winners, and Trump, along with his “hateful followers,” wants to kill them all and their chillunz, too.
Funny, I seem to remember Irish Mafia, Jewish Mafia, Irish Mafia, child labor instead of school, farming work instead of school, and even the Gangs of New York (not the movie, the real history).
And last time I looked, immigration policy was encoded in statutes, and not on a poem that was written years after the Statue of LIberty was finally dedicated and opened.
Yep, Trump ponders all day on how to get rid of, and prevent all immigrants. Along with his “hateful followers.”
Nice.
Abe, my wife (Irish, English, German, Cherokee Indian, born in D.C., grew up in Oxon Hill,MD) always told me I was an Irish Leo, too. When her grandmother on her dad’s side came to our wedding and saw my clan she exclaimed “My God, they’re Black-Irish” . . .that is Irish from the West Coast with Spanish blood (my uncles and aunts had jet black hair and brown eyes; when I worked construction summers during college I got darker than the Italian-laborers (I was in an Italian-American local, which had a lot of Italian immigrants) . . .
Although all four grandparents came from Ireland, I am now related by blood and marriage to just about every race, religion and ethnic group in America. When someone asked, “Any Hindus in your family?” I said, “Not that I know of, at least not yet.” God bless America.
I only cook grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches. Your scrumptious recipes remind me of my lifelong friends Paul and Charlie fishing off Martha’s Vineyard around 1981 catching blue-fish taking them back to Charlie’s sister’s husband’s cottage (rental) where the wives cooked them up . . delicious . . .also my niece’s husband teaches fishing to high-school and junior high schoolers, (just a few weeks ago I met a few of his students on Craigville Beach, Cape Cod)and he recently posted a pic of himself with two nearly three-foot long fish (bass?) he pulled from the Cape Cod Canal one night a few weeks back.
In my many trips across America, I met farmers and ranchers and cowboys and cowgirls . . .e.g., went to oldest continuous rodeo in Payson Arizona and a 4-H festival in southeast Idaho. . .and saw how good folks expertly handle animals and what good folks produce via animal husbandry . . .
Two Dorchester lifelong friends of mine became Ranchers . . .Bobby has 200-plus head of cattle in Atascadero (sp. not far from Moro Bay), California (we visited him right after 9-11) and Bill has horses, farm animals in South Carolina (Bill posts regularly on Facebook).
Two inner city Boston kids end up as ranchers/farmers, one out West, the other down South . . .what a great country . . .
I am sure that the fish caught in the canal were Stripped Bass. I use to night fish for them down off the Scusset Jetty. Live eels were the bait.
I love traveling in The West. I built a house for my best friend’s sister in Greeley, Nebraska. Pop. 600. A great town south of The Sandhills of Nebraska that is huge in area with less than 600 residents. Real corn/cattle country. They have a rodeo every year around July 4th as I am sure hundreds of town out there do.
My friend’s family has a great history. His father was a dirt farmer in Greeley and he went into the Army at the start of WWII. He was at D Day and soon after got shot. They sent him to a hospital in England where he met a nurse from Dorchester, Kate O’Donnell. She and he parted ways when he was sent back to France. He was shot again and ended up in the same hospital. Again they met and became quite close. His stay was shorter this time and back to war he went. At the Bulge he got shot in the belly and again his nurse was Kate from Dorchester. This time he was done with fighting and headed back to Boston after his discharge. They married and decided to live in Milton. They wanted to raise kids where the schools were better than Greeley. (His education was in a one room schoolhouse and she wouldn’t go for that at all.) They bought a lot and he built their house. They had four boys and two girls and would drive out to Greeley every summer for a month. The oldest daughter ended up marrying a rancher from that town and lives there still, tending 5000 acres of corn and 5000 acres with cows. I have visited her many times.
So there you go. Another product of the Boston Irish family ending up on a ranch out in The West.
The elusive.
Matt knows the police got Trump elected President
right Matt?
from a never linguistic bolo punching
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/aug/7/black-lives-matter-protesters-crash-police-officer/
Black Lives Matter protesters crash police officer’s wedding: ‘You’re a murderer!’
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/11/no_author/feds-killed-mlk/
“Orders to Kill” Dr. Martin Luther King: The Government that Honors MLK with a National Holiday Killed Him
A Review of The Plot to Kill King by William Pepper
By Edward Curtin
GlobalResearch.ca
November 30, 2016
reporting from somewhere in a place called Maine
https://bangordailynews.com/2018/08/05/news/york/prosecutors-to-review-claim-that-2-deputies-terrorized-man-over-limo-dispute/
Prosecutors to review claim that 2 deputies terrorized man over limo dispute
Wow
NC “ no one with a brain is moving to China ….”
Yep Martin Luther King felt safe in Amerika.
That is why he told us “ he may not get to
the mountain top”
and then the FBI put a bullet in his brain
NC did get that part right about the media
In 1981 I filed a petition to deny the
license renewal of Maine Public Radio
with the FCC
you are a few years late on the media sparky
in other dyslexia
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/08/01/can-stop-scientific-brain-drain-china/TFhIJlQ33sxdTzdgWcGZwI/story.html
Can the US stop the scientific brain drain to China?
also see
https://www.amazon.com/Blue-day-white-night-supremacist/dp/B0006P0YIM
Blue by Day, White by Night: Organized White Supremacist Groups in Law Enforcement
… – Michael Novick –
Title, Blue by Day, White by Night: Organized White Supremacist Groups in Law Enforcement Agencies. Author , Michael Novick. Contributor, People Against Racist Terror (Organization). Publisher, PART, 1993.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/06/berkeley-activists-arrested-police-identified-twitter
under fire for publishing anti-fascist activists’ names and photos
Unusual release of arrested demonstrators’ identities could fuel harassment and abuse, experts and activists say
Mon 6 Aug 2018 17.43 EDT Last modified on Mon 6 Aug 2018 20.58 EDT
Berkeley police have arrested more than a dozen anti-fascist activists and posted their names and photos on Twitter, raising concerns that the department was encouraging harassment and abuse.
Law enforcement’s unusual deci
gotta mow the lawn, set up the keyboards, and hit the gym . . . before work . . .my part-time job. . . .
P.S. just got back from 3 weeks down Cape, sand, surf, salt-water, ocean, food from the sea, can’t beat it . . . but a lot of guys got hit with that summer flu, they said was brutal and long lasting . . .hope all fully recovered by now . .. hope even the liberals and leftist fully recover and get back in fighting/arguing/debating shape soon . . .
“….gotta mow the lawn….”
You had to remind me. Oh, well. My red-haired, Irish, Leo of a wife will thank me when she gets home. I’ll tell her it was your idea.
That’s a good post, Bill. I agree with much of it. I was a Nature Boy growing up and got a lot of flack when the Olde Blue Bloods taught me how to hunt. Fishing was OK but when I bought a Remington 870 pump with my left over Bar Mitzvah money, my parents were the target of many derisive comments. My father was a strict Reverence For Life man but had enough sense to allow me to legally harvest game with proper supervision. He wouldn’t shoot an animal in a million years but couldn’t imagine stopping me from doing something that was not only legal, but something I loved as well. And a well roasted pheasant or crock potted grouse wasn’t a bad by product. Ever eat winter flounder fillets flash fried in peanut oil? They don’t suck.
I find the Right to be as bigoted as the Left. Its just that the Right KNOW they are being bigoted.
I find the hate, bigotry, intolerance, and anti-science comes mostly from the Left. I find Liberal Dems stir up hatred by claiming small government conservatives are “anti-Immigrant” “anti-Science” “deniers of Global Warming.” . . .As a scientist myself, grounded in biological-medical sciences, working as an environmental scientist-toxicologist, working with scientists in the addiction/drug abuse fields, et cetera, et cetera, I’ve seen the good that science does (vaccines, controlling air pollution, preventing disease)and the negative effects of excess regulation/extremism of the environmental fanatics. I’ve seen the Anti-Life dems deny there’s a human being growing in a human mother’s womb and push for abortion on demand. I’ve seen hatred aplenty dispensed by “liberals” in the Media, Academia, the FEDs, the Internationalist-Imperialists and the Atheistic-Antagonists who want to drive Freedom of Religion under ground. I’ve seen the Media claim that they alone own the Freedom of the Press, which applies to every American who puts pen to paper or publishes a pamphlet or parades with hand made signs. Print freely; speak freely; question everything; and don’t cast aspersions on those who doubt the so-called “gurus” who oftentimes are proven wrong.
Yes, I condemn hate and ignorance and bigotry on the Right and on the Left, but in my lifetime I’ve found that it is predominantly the Leftists, the Liberal Dems in the Media and Academia etc, through distortion of facts and through false labeling of the learned opposition and through scare tactics and through mudslinging and character assassination like labeling half of Americans “deplorables” . . .the Liberal Dems in Media, Academia and the FEDS and their allies in the private sector are the major manufacturers of hate in America . . .in my humble experience, based on many decades of experiencing, understanding and judging the issue of “hate in America.”
Hillary and her minions were hateful haters . . .
Albert Schweitzer, whose philosophy was Reverence for Life, was a lover . . . a man who sacrificed all to serve . . . .like many conservatives in Medicine, the Military, Social Services, and among teachers . . .there are many good folks on the left and right in America who merely have different opinions about government, for example, I’m against government unions and pro-private sector unions, I’m for a smaller federal government, less interventionistic, I’m for reasonable environmental regulations, I’m for turning more pasture land to forests, but I’m for fishing, fowling, culling, wildlife management although I praise vegetarians for their goals, I’m pro-life and I’m pro-animals, but I’m also favor fishing and hunting and ranching and farming, and think all these things can be done humanely . . .and I’m sick and tired of leftist academics and leftist media-types preaching panaceas to the American People from their High Horses . . .they don’t have all the answers . . .they’re generally wrong . . .as Bill Buckley said, he’d rather be governed by the first 100 names in the Boston Telephone Directory than the entire faculty at Harvard . . .apocryphal, tongue-in-cheek, but not far from the Truth . . .Buckley also said, that if he himself were nominated for office he wouldn’t run, and if elected he wouldn’t serve . . .we need more balanced, salt of the earth folks running governments, less FEDs, more local control, less Interventionism (Might Makes Right: the USA has all the answers) and more respect for other nations, cultures and peoples, and we need more respect in the Media and Academia for conservatives’, traditionalists’ views . . . .I went to school with these leftists . . .I didn’t find them any smarter than the rightists . . . .that the left controls the Media/Academia/FEDs is too bad . . .that Mueller chose only leftist pro-Hillary Dems for his team is a shame . . .less than one third of Americans are liberal . . .less than 10% leftists . . .LEFTISTS OPEN YOUR MINDS: YOU DON’T HAVE ALL THE ANSWERS; GET OFF YOUR HIGH HORSES…come on down to earth, roll in the mud . . .get on your knees and scrub some floors / / /or try praying, it might help you . . .
Just saying . . .
Bill C, you hit the nail on the head
Are Luddites and hateful followers the same as deplorables? Trump is trying to fix a broken immigration system. Trump is trying to fix a broken global trade system. One should be thankful for his efforts and not resort to name calling. Trump’s approval rating is 50% in one poll. His handling of the economy is over 50%. Half the American people support Trump. Only 17% think the media is truthful. Do you want to defend the press coverage of the people in Southie and Dorchester during the busing crisis? It was a vicious smear campaign labeling the opposition as racist. Cullen, Barnicle and Janet Cook are truthful? Walter Duranty? Much of the media is Fake News. 2. Trump’s critics can say what they want in this free country. Can they express themselves in China? No one with a brain is moving to a one party Communist country where no individual rights exist. America has welcomed over forty million immigrants the last half century. How many has China?