About them "Immigrants!"

“LOST MUSKET DIARY” Thursday July 17, 2014

Sunny (Again, grrrr!) 80 F/27 C in Rancho Las Musket

Answering phones. Checking the news on the Internet. All the signs point to a big news day. Jetliner shot down…295 killed. Fingers pointing. Refugees still swarming our borders. Rick Perry still shocked. But, Ted Cruz has a solution and people are asking him to go back to Canada and think it over some more. New pins in the “Impeach President Obama” doll.  And, my hometown newspaper, The Riverhead News Review has a headline, “Border Children Reunite in Riverhead.”

It’s the heartwarming story of two young boys who trekked from Guatemala through Mexico and skirted Rick Perry at the Texas frontier to be reunited with their family in my home town out on Long Island. Riverhead, New York. Here, we won’t even let our kids walk to the store by themselves, but these boys walked from Guatemala and Mexico to get here. Estabon, 16 and Pedro 14, were first cared for by the people of the former “Bear Flag Republic,” (yes, gentle reader. The Golden State of California was once an independent nation, kind of like Texas, but richer and more enlightened!) This news from my home town warmed my heart. Imagine. Card carrying New Yorkers helping “immigrants.” Especially friends of my family’s from Riverhead. How dare they! Commies! And, they put it in our local paper. The nerve of them! Now, Estabon and Pedro are awaiting a decision from those warm hearted souls a “La Migra” if they can stay with their mom.

Even from a distance, I’m optimistic, because I’m old enough to remember going to grade school in Riverhead and seeing all the new kids that flooded in after World War II. Most of them were Polish kids; a few were German kids, Dieter and Garth, and an English one or two. There was one Swiss boy, Helmut and a pretty, I think, Russian girl - Valeria. I remember the Polish kids best, because there were quite a few of them. Mary and Paul were two that I recall. Plus the fact that a lot of people from Poland had settled around my home town. The new kids had people who spoke their language. Lately, I’ve run into a few of them at class reunions. They all speak pretty good English now. You’d never know that they were once “D.P.s.” Huh? You ask? What’s a D.P? Just like I explained to my son Mike one night over a drink at Doc’s Tavern in “Polish Town.”

“D.P.” was an abbreviation for “Displaced Person.” It was the official United Nations designation for those Europeans who had been left homeless by the war. Some were orphans, sole survivors of entire families that had been killed by the Nazis. So after the war, America opened its borders and its heart and welcome thousands of these refugees. And you know what? The kids that started at my school, the ones who couldn’t speak a word of English when they arrived learned English and studied, math, and spelling, played in the school band and in a little while, fit right in. After a while we forgot that they were once “DP’s”. Now, if you ask somebody around those parts what a “D.P.” is, they won’t know what you’re talking about.

So, if Ted Cruz and Rick Perry and their friends would just shut the hell up and get out of the way, America could get on with the business of being America again.

Ciao! Mike Botula