American Mosaic

Gradient Spectrum by Erin Pankratz Smith

Dear Mr. President,

I'm an immigrant, "naturalized" to US citizenship in the early 1980s. What a day that was for us as a family — the sense of safety and privilege was very high.

We were permanent residents for a long time but in the 1970s, despite my father's best efforts, at that point when we were so close to achieving citizenship, the INS lost our entire file and the process had to restart at great cost. This occurred at a time when my parents were also planning for our college educations. 

[Ultimately, my parents sent their three daughters to Carnegie Mellon University, Swarthmore College, and Northwestern University. At this point in our lives, I've run my own business for nearly 30 years; my Swarthmore-educated sister is a psychologist with a Master's degree from Duke University; and my youngest sister is an MBA (Cal-Berkeley) and VP of info tech with Wells Fargo. This is significant for us because a mere century ago in China, girls were not considered worth educating, and we might've even had bound feet!]

Because our own naturalization process had been so arduous, I've had mixed feelings about the "line jumping" of illegal immigrants, but continue to believe we're all humans trying to attain the same things, and that first and foremost this is a nation of immigrant stories. As you emphasized, this is what makes America vibrant and innovative. This I saw at Carnegie Mellon, which has the planet's oldest and finest robotics program, and a diverse mix of brilliant engineering students from all over the world.

I live in Atlanta, a metro region that's benefited from a huge "diversity explosion" beginning in the mid-1980s. (My only child is a mixed-race kid who says "You can't say Caucasian without also saying Asian!"). It's taken 30 years, but we're now seeing the advantages of a diverse population, although we continue to struggle with the downsides of racism and xenophobia. Every day in DeKalb county where I live, I have interactions with refugees/immigrants from Ethiopia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Vietnam, Uganda, Nigeria, Bosnia, and Russia. Despite cultural differences, I continue to find that we all want the same things. These are not freeloaders or thugs, but people working hard to make a living (in jobs no American adult wants), who just want to see their children thrive in school.

Your speech the other night was exceptional. If your executive order is regarded as a "lawless" act, then let them find the laws to prove it.

Inclusive to my love for Australia, where I spent a part of my childhood, I feel very proud to be an American. I have conservative friends who regard me as idealistic and naive; "intellectually lazy" for believing that racism still undergirds political differences; and way too liberal for my own good. But if being liberal means we fall on the right side of history for offering safe harbor to refugee children fleeing murderous gangs in Central America; finding insurance solutions for those who've never before been able to afford it; or defining a sane and unthreatening path to citizenship so families can stay together, then I'd rather be liberal. People come to this country for safe harbor, and to pursue — and to innovate on — opportunities they could not find elsewhere.

As for the rest, they can (as you said) Pass A Bill. I'm sick to death of the obstructionism and brinksmanship, all the low-grade political skirmishing, with none of the governance. We are in real danger of becoming an oligarchy, and our Congress of the past six years has been a disgrace.

Thank you.

The atrocities of narcissism

John Rabe's diary

I've been reading books about "the rape of Nanking" for a couple years, part of research for my next book project. It's not a calming experience. From 1937-38, Nanking was described by eyewitnesses as a literal Hell on earth, but for the actions of a dozen Americans and Europeans who stepped up to protect the vulnerable. Their mere presence often prevented the oppressors from proceeding with the worst sorts of crimes against humanity, and even then such atrocities occurred with frequency and impunity. 

Because I do like to read history and historical fiction, a constant question is "Could this happen again?" Could genocides like the Rape of Nanking happen again? And the answer is yes: such things do repeat themselves (eg, Rwanda).

Then you ask the question another way....

Could the "heroes of Nanking" happen again? 

Although we've seen the professionalization of humanitarian aid-givers, people like John Rabe, Dr. Robert Wilson (left), and Minnie Vautrin acted as private individuals, as much on the strength of personal conviction as professional creed. There was no UN or Peace Corps in their lifetimes. There was no guidebook re: "how to save ordinary people from atrocity." Given every opportunity to evacuate, they chose to remain long after their peers fled the scene, and — in advocating for victims — had repeated confrontations with the Japanese command.

After all the powerful and affluent departed, the Chinese left in Nanking were those too poor to travel, with nowhere to go, just like the disenfranchised among us today (think: Katrina and the low-income communities of NOLA). This also included demoralized soldiers from the Chinese army, in retreat from advancing Japanese forces. Many of the Chinese troops were teenaged boys already worn down after months of defending Shanghai. Their own command was fleeing upriver ahead of them.

Dr. Wilson operated on mangled bodies for hours without rest, later dying young because his health was compromised by those months in 1937-38.

Minnie Vautrin had a nervous breakdown after giving safe harbor to 10,000 women and children on a campus set up to care for only 3,000 refugees. Part of what exhausted Vautrin were the daily improvisations for survival — not just administering the school during a brutal occupation, but negotiating safety terms with the callous Japanese command, coordinating with her Safety Zone colleagues for a daunting scarcity of food supplies, and safeguarding the women and children. The campus was large, she couldn't be four places at once, and Japanese soldiers were continually scaling the walls and assaulting women inside the campus — or duping her into surrendering the women and girls in her care.

For three months, no one left alive in Nanking was able to wash themselves because Japanese atrocities had compromised all water sources. (Cooked rice had the coppery taste of blood). Given Japanese orders that all corpses were to be left out in the open, there was constant threat of disease, and malnutrition alone produced an outbreak of beri-beri.

John Rabe didn't sleep, patrolling the grounds of the Nanking Safety Zone every night, pulling Japanese soldiers off the women and girls they were trying to rape. To no avail, he wrote letters to Hitler, imploring him to intervene with the Japanese emperor and halt the brutal lawlessness in his beloved Nanking. When his Siemens employer recalled Rabe to Germany, he was stunned — and deeply moved — to see 2,000 women amassed before him, bowing in gratitude but also begging him not to leave. His post-war years were so impoverished, Frau Rabe took to making nettle soup from the weeds in their yard. Hearing of this, the grateful people of Nanking sent them money that eased his final years.

The "atrocity" of narcissism

After Tuesday's elections, we're further immersed in a nation where democracy has been forsaken for oligarchy, and our poor and disadvantaged will be criminalized — where those with wealth and power will only struggle to accrue more of it — even if it means betraying their neighbors and employees — and an act of compassion is more of a tax shelter than an effort to fix the roots of a chronic social problem.

In 2015, turn compassion and generosity into small, achievable actions. It doesn't have to mean donating gobs of money. Write your Congressman and call him out on his inaction; let the corrupt know that you're watching them. Start a bus-stop library. Teach one evening of economic literacy at the community center of a low-income neighborhood; talk to middle schoolers about the stock market, so they see role-modeling for financial decisionmaking. Convince a kid not to drop out, and urge him to stay in school for greater gains yet to come. Read a book to an elderly invalid or a hospitalized veteran. Drop off some bagels in the teachers' breakroom of your local public school.

It doesn't have to be much. Two hours from your life can remake someone else's entire existence — it can give them hope. Just like the heroes of Nanking, small ordinary actions can give an oppressed person reasons to hope. With hope they might hang in one more day; persisting one more day can make the difference between survival or annihilation. And I know from personal experience that when you feel beat-down or heartbroken, the best antidote is to live outside yourself. Stand for something that serves more than just yourself. Live in paradox, and delight in your anonymity: you'll be surprised how much gets done when you don't care who gets the credit for it.

Maybe if each private individual does a little bit, we can build small acts of social justice into enough critical mass to turn the heedless tide of narcissism and greed and corruption that's swamping our American values. It's up to each of us, not our so-called leaders, because the ordinary world is filled with extraordinary stories — and you are one of them.