Language of Love

All of us have delighted in the innocence radiated by babies, so pure and blameless. The sight of toddlers of every hue and heritage playing together in the nursery can’t help but bring a smile to our face. Their purity reminds us of our common origin, whether we refer to the collision of the Higgs boson particle or the Garden of Eden; at one time we were one in our nakedness, were we not?

So it is particularly disturbing to hear the inflammatory rhetoric about the immigrants striving to find a better life in America, families seeking haven being stigmatized as if they were merely a political problem rather than flesh and blood human beings. Historically, America always has welcomed those with hopes and dreams of better lives, as the Emma Lazarus poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty proclaims, … “send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

A change in attitude has beset America, and I think I know why. A few summers ago my husband and I were on a spur-of-the-moment vacation to the Mexican coastal town of Ixtapa, where we have spent a good part of the past thirty winters. Only this time it was June. And we were among the few Americans in town during this humid time of the year.

For Mexicans, accustomed to the seasonal weather, June is the start of their vacation season. Families from Mexico City and Morelia flock to the beaches on the Pacific coast filling up the hotels at the same resort towns where Americans and Canadian snowbirds escape to when the first frost hits the pumpkin.

Mexican nationals were the majority and tourists from north of the border were in the minority. Everything was invertido, reversed. For many of the visitors, it was a problem they didn’t expect; instead of English spoken everywhere they were among locals speaking Spanish so rapidly it sounded like a jack hammer on a tin roof.

Here’s the point of their exaggerated experience: when they were back home, they were the “us,” and indifferent to the disparity of “Us” versus “Them.” But with the order of the relationship reversed, that was all they perceived, the unfamiliar becoming the feared. They no longer felt like pampered tourists, catered to by invisible waiters and maids. All they heard was a different language and all they saw were their dissimilarities in cultures; and they magnified the differences, hearing danger in a conspiring whisper lurking behind every unfamiliar vowel.

I think that’s what is happening in the United States, the fear of “the other” magnified as the numbers shift and minorities grow into constituencies, and unscrupulous leaders see the growing anxiety as an opportunity to be exploited.

What will it take to create understanding rather than apprehension; to see the differences in dress and cuisine as covers of the innocent naked baby that all of us were. This morning the tag on my Yogi tea bag is an answer, reminding us that “the path may be different, but all lead to the same destination.”

Maybe we should give Esperanto another try. How about teaching Spanish in elementary school, Chinese in middle school, Russian in high school? Certainly teaching a language we all understand would be a start.

But wait, we already have one. It’s called love.