Fear of immigrants

 At the gas station yesterday, the card reader at the pump wasn't working, so I had to pay inside. I hate paying inside. I will forego a "cash discount" to pay at the pump because I dislike the time spent on human interaction that seems just as likely to expose me to someone else's poor health choices. Since the Covid 19 pandemic revealed the deep layers of asininity in so much of the American public, I have assiduously avoided exposure to concentrations of people as much as my job and the logistics of life will allow. But I digress.

I had not been inside at this particular convenience store literally in years. I had not noticed when the ownership passed from local rednecks to a family of people who appear to be from the Indian subcontinent. The station is having a price war with one just down the road, also owned by a family corporation of people from the Indian subcontinent. It may even be the same family corporation; the station down the road was embroiled in a lengthy zoning controversy during which we all learned about the company behind it and their little petroleum empire in the region.

The guy behind the counter spoke virtually unintelligible English. In situations like this I imagine myself attending "Hindi as a Second Language" adult education courses. Try as I might to become a polyglot, my only fluency is in American English and Profanity. But it struck me how fear of the immigrant has gained such power as hardworking entrepreneurs who don't talk Amurican have flourished in this particular area of vital supply. It's not just that they're "from away." Immigrants have always been pressed into low level jobs, and some of them always rise to positions of power in industries that they might have entered as low-wage labor. But as the United States has sought to be more and more accommodating to non-English speakers, non-English speakers have had less and less incentive to try to master the language that most of us whiteys grew up viewing as normal.

An American corporation owned and operated by immigrants only needs to interact with the legal establishment with multilingual fluency. At the street level, customers and staff get by with mumbles, gestures, and telepathy. The private operations of the corporation can be conducted in Hindi, Urdu, Somali, Czech, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Russian, whatever, largely impenetrable to the average dope like me who can pick up a word or two here and there, if that. It's as if sovereign nations exist within our borders, technically answerable to the law, but insulated from our amateur critical examination by the mere fact that we have no idea what anyone is saying.

I handed the guy my credit card and shuffled back out the to the pumps. Right now I have the worst respiratory ailment I've had in five years, so I was in no mood to dally. It would either be all right or it wouldn't. I don't know if he took my flat affect and grumpiness as a comment on his apparent country of origin, but it was strictly a result of the fact that I wouldn't have left my house at all if the forecast for the next several days hadn't been much worse for someone feeling sick to spend a few minutes pumping gas in the frigid wind.

I can't let myself give a single shit whether the country ends up majority-minority, because I can't do a damn thing about it anyway. And it shouldn't matter, if the enlightenment principles on which our constitution were based really are essential human values. The values will speak for themselves in whatever language a person finds comfortable. And if those values aren't strong enough to become universal, they were fucked anyway. Humanity's future holds endless, insoluble conflict. Any "winner" of a global contest by force or guile will not be nice or enlightened. You can only fight for peace so many times before you realize that it's an endless stupid cycle, and we'd all be better off being trustworthy. Maybe that happens someday. Maybe not. I didn't bet anyone's life on it.

Still, I completely understand the paranoia of people who feel excluded by the opaque subcultures they see forming around them. It could be bad. Or it could be fine. You can bitch. You can engage in pointless, localized violence, making everyone more miserable for zero gain. But you can't change the course of social evolution. Eventually, all the nations of the world were going to meet each other and have to work out some kind of planetary understanding, whether it's a happy future appreciating each other's food and music, or bloody murder suicide.