Dear Tillamook,
I spent 10 years attending a private Christian school. Among the ideologies we were taught was the understanding that we were a great country precisely because of immigrants. I understood that we wouldn’t be a country without them. I didn’t imagine it. All the evidence of history and personal experience proved it. I was taught that all who come here and contribute are deserving of a good life in this country, and who has contributed more than immigrants? We are all of us, except for indigenous people, immigrants, or descended from immigrants. That is a fact. A fact that most are quite proud of. However, it has become alarmingly obvious that there are some in this community and this country and this regime that do not consider anyone of a darker complexion or a Latin-tinged accent to be worthy of living in this country, or even living at all. The 250-year American experiment of a representative democracy, a democratic republic, must have an educated populace that understands the why and how of America. At the very least, we must all sing from the hymnal of the Constitution and take to heart the maxim of “e pluribus unum.” We must have a government that reflects the people, not the other way around. If you are as alarmed and sickened by the conscienceless mass brutality being perpetrated by this regime upon the innocent, hard-working communities in this country, even if you are only worried about the effect of “deportations” on our local dairy economy, then please speak up while you still can. Think: if they disappear all the brown people, who will they come for next to fill up all those work camps and prisons? We used to liberate concentration camps; now we build them. Is that the America you want?
Respectfully,
ML Hilton
Tillamook, Oregon