Si se puede -- A Movement Grows

We have become accustomed to seeing mass protests taking place in cities around the world -- usually by people denouncing the United States and its government. Now we are presented with yet another mass protest -- and what a protest it is -- but this time the marchers are people whose main desire is to come to America to work and live. That, properly understood, is some of the best news I have seen in recent months.

The LA Times reports:

Joining what some are calling the nation's largest mobilization of immigrants ever, hundreds of thousands of people boisterously marched in downtown Los Angeles Saturday to protest federal legislation that would crack down on undocumented immigrants, penalize those who help them and build a security wall on the U.S. southern border. Spirited crowds representing labor, religious groups, civil-rights advocates and ordinary immigrants stretched over 26 blocks of downtown Los Angeles from Adams Blvd. along Spring Street and Broadway to City Hall, tooting kazoos, waving American flags and chanting "Si se puede!" (Yes we can!). The crowd, estimated by police at more than 500.000, represented one of the largest protest marches in Los Angeles history, surpassing Vietnam War demonstrations and the 70,000 who rallied downtown against Proposition 187, a 1994 state initiative that denied public benefits to undocumented migrants.

The marchers included both longtime residents and the newly arrived, bound by a desire for a better life and a love for this county.

Joining what some are calling the nation's largest mobilization of immigrants ever, hundreds of thousands of people boisterously marched in downtown Los Angeles Saturday to protest federal legislation that would crack down on undocumented immigrants, penalize those who help them and build a security wall on the U.S. southern border. Spirited crowds representing labor, religious groups, civil-rights advocates and ordinary immigrants stretched over 26 blocks of downtown Los Angeles from Adams Blvd. along Spring Street and Broadway to City Hall, tooting kazoos, waving American flags and chanting "Si se puede!" (Yes we can!). The crowd, estimated by police at more than 500.000, represented one of the largest protest marches in Los Angeles history, surpassing Vietnam War demonstrations and the 70,000 who rallied downtown against Proposition 187, a 1994 state initiative that denied public benefits to undocumented migrants.

The marchers included both longtime residents and the newly arrived, bound by a desire for a better life and a love for this county.

Read it here.

There is an ugly mood abroad in America these days -- indeed, throughout the West. People feel threatened -- economically, culturally, and even physically -- by the changes piling in upon us. In such circumstances it is natural for people to huddle into a protective crouch, withdrawing from the seemingly inexorable forces that are transforming the world and heralding an uncertain future. There is a sense that our great days are behind us and we must preserve what we can of a glorious past.

Whether the point of reference is the "good war" against Hitler, or John Kennedy's audacious "New Frontier" or the "social justice" triumphs of the fifties and sixtied, or Johnson's "Great Society," Democrats who once saw themselves as the wave of the future now find that they are custodians of an unappreciated past that is rapidly receding into the mist of history.

Republicans, too, see greatness slipping away from them. No longer do people seem to honor what many on the right see as the eternal truths embodied in "the Reagan revolution." It seems that the crystal purity of that hallowed historical moment is sinking slowly, but relentlessly, beneath a tide of corruption, bloat, and fiscal irresponsibility.

Ah, "those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end...." But they did.

The future that once seemed so bright, now seems to be filled with looming and overwhelming peril. The news reflects this distorted, even paranoid, unease -- relentlessly hammering away at negative themes and magnifying threats, giving a megaphoned voice to critics and naysayers. The worst are filled with passionate intensity [apologies to W. B. Yeats, the greatest poet of the Twentieth Century].

Ignoring the plain evidence before them more and more Americans are retreating into a sour dystopian fantasy. The national economy is booming, but people see it in shambles. Globalization is lifting literally billions of people around the world out of poverty, but all we see is disorder and chaos. Both international and intra-national violence have been declining for nearly two decades, but even educated and informed people believe the opposite. More and more people are living longer and better lives, but we worry about the rain forest. Tyrannies are crumbling and democracies rising in improbable places, but all we pay attention to is the disorder of transition and failure of the good to match the ideal.

These are mean and troubling times, and the greatest threats we face do not come from abroad. They are in our hearts and souls. We can at least take some comfort that most Americans, as usual, have not succumbed to the insanity that is now sweeping through Europe. That is primarily an affliction of our self-styled "intellectuals" on the coasts. But even in the hearland a dangerous disquiet is roiling just beneath the surface of our political culture. It is something that we must fight. We must embrace the future, not retreat from it. We are Americans; and for the sake of the world, we cannot allow ourselves to degenerate into mere Europeans.

At least the immigrants who are marching in the streets of our cities know the worth of this land. So do I, and at least conceptually [there are no protest marches in the sleeping mountains of Pennsylvania] I will walk beside them into the future.

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A.M. Mora y Leon was at the protests. He writes:

How very unlike France, whose embittered immigrants just want to wreck things, or whose frightened, distrustful students just want to preserve their privileges! Here we have something incredibly different, the crie de coeur of the people who share our society, just pleading for a right to inclusion. So that they can get better jobs, so that they can get house mortgages, so that they can freely travel to see their relatives in Mexico, so that they can avail themselves of all the privileges and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship - and I am not kidding, they were pleading for citizenship - and transform this country with a new dynamic wave of their own contributions, too.

Well said!

Read him here.

For another perspective see Mickey Kaus's writeup in Slate [here]. Kaus thinks that the size of the rally and the openly pro-Mexican sentiments expressed will intimidate voters and boost support for anti-immigrant legislation. A lot of people, he argues, after watching this rally will think, "we better build that fence quick."