Latinos, please listen...
You are all in danger
This post has nothing at all to do with atheism. The first word in the my substack title, “morality” — doing what is right — is what motivates me here. I speak not as an alarmist but as the daughter of a woman who had to flee for her life from fascist Italy.
I am writing this post for a family that is unlikely to ever read it. This is a Latino family who lives in Nevada that I saw interviewed on TV news before the election. They were voting for Trump despite the fact that they had members of their family who were undocumented immigrants. They did not think they had anything to fear — they were hardworking, law-abiding, probably church-going, members of the community — the sort of family who tend to be called “ordinary decent people.” They had “family values,” they said. They weren’t criminals.
So listen up. This isn’t about deporting criminals. This is about crazy people who hate Latinos. It is an irrational hatred. It is not about what you do. It is about what you are - not “white.”
My mother was not a criminal. She was a high school student trying to get good grades. Not a single person in my family was a criminal. They were hardworking, law-abiding, and polite to their neighbors. But for the rise of fascism they would have likely lived out their lives without doing anything that anyone would have thought remotely unusual. My grandfather had a small business selling office supplies. My grandmother was a housewife. It is difficult to be more ordinary than they were.
But there was one thing about them, that to the fascists, made them vermin. They were Jewish. This one thing literally made it illegal for them to be alive. The very act of trying to escape a concentration camp was a crime. The act of helping someone escape was also a crime. Despite that, people risked their lives to help various members of my family escape the fascists’ clutches. Those people were so brave and so good. They risked their lives when they could have gone about their their business without being bothered in the slightest by fascist death squads.
So I owe a debt. To me it seems you are in the crosshairs. It is my moral obligation to do no less than what was done for my family for the next victims of this monstrous ideology that keeps reappearing.
But there are others who don’t have a debt, just like those who saved my family. They are simply the best people and they will stand up for you too because that is what the best people do.