support your local immigrant

I'm sure a lot of people have written extensively about all this, placing this post more into the "what I had for (breakfast) [activism] yesterday" category, but whatever...

After a weekend of minor annoyances (eg, losing my phone) and other forms of relaxation (of or pertaining to the modern life of the soul) I went with a drisha compatriot to Union Square yesterday afternoon. There was the expected assortment of middle-of-the-road/liberal/humanist sentiment (from "We just want to pay income taxes," "we work for you, now work with us," to various "what ever happened to 'give me your ...huddled masses...'?"), mildly political ("I didn't cross the border, the border crossed me"), and socialist/internationalist/etc "coalitions" (I for one had forgotten about the existence of ANSWER since I graduated from college) with stickers tht say things like "Bush is the symptom, Capitalism is the Disease, Revolution is the cure."

It seemed that no-one could agree on the pronoun that starts of the slogan "___ pueblo, unido, jamas sera vencido," which was kind of funny. Also funny, in a different way, was the rapper who did a song about immigrants in which he talked about being sent "home." Not necessarily the thing to stress when the theme is "we are america." ;)

The crowd was almost exclusively non-black latino, with the exception of the hatians who appeared more to demonstrate about what goes on in Haiti than here. I wondered how much anyone even tried to organize in non-Spanish-speaking communities. (ISO posters in English, Arabic, and Spanish notwithstanding - which, btw, always strike me as more of a backwards orientalism than any real attmept at connecting with arabs...)

My favorite speaker, of those I heard, was probably the catholic priest ("there are no "undocumented ones" before God"), proving once again that I probably am more of a religious person thanI often think. Maybe I just liked him because he was the one who's spanish i could follow best, but maybe that itself was because he (unlike some other speakers) didn't feel the need to yell unintelligibly just because he had a microphone.

Two 6-7 year old brothers cought on to the "yell about what's important to you" theme and briefly started chanting "No More School."


Today I got one comment of the "you went to _that_ but you couldn't come to the Darfur rally!?" sort (apparently neither the eight hour travel-time differential nor the fact that even more Jews than have suffered genocides have been immigrants is not relevant here...), which was silly for a number of reasons. Perhaps some other time I'll rant about How Orthodox Jews Discovered Non-Israel-Related Political Activism {That Still Lets Those Who Want To Hate Arabs} Without Engaging In Domestic Politics.

Look at me, I think it's ok to post half-formed political opinions.
Maybe I'll improve in Law School...