We booked a last-minute cruise for last weekend, because I was really in dire need of some laughs after a lot of un-funny times. Cruises are my happy place where I can turn off my brain and just be present. It's also a social opportunity that I love to have. Sure, we end up meeting people from down the street, or exotic Tampa, but there are always fantastic encounters with people from all over the world, especially among the crew. I love to hear their stories, about where they're from, about their families.
You can imagine then my sadness when I catch news stories about people with extraordinary hate for people of different ethnic backgrounds, races and national origin. First there was the bat-shit crazy lawyer in New York who made a racist spectacle of himself, and not for the first time, apparently. Then there's the border patrol agent in Montana who assumed that because a woman was speaking Spanish, she was obviously an illegal immigrant. Let that sink in. "Papers please" is not a thing here in the US, especially for citizens.
Look, I don't care where you fall politically in terms of immigration policy. The fact is that the US is a nation founded and built by immigrants, and it's still being built by immigrants. More to the point, these are human beings, and in these cases, voting American citizens. They have the same rights I do.
We have to stop allowing this sort of thing to be OK. While I'm certainly making the case that the diversity around us makes people interesting, I would also argue that we all have more in common than not. We all came from two other human beings, everybody poops and we'll all be dead eventually. When you have a finite number of minutes to live, why would you spend so many disliking people you don't even know?
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