MY TAKE/THE DRIFT

From the Editor and Publisher

Coming To America, or Why I Am Strongly Pro-Immigrant

This Independence Summer #246 I am reminded of my own immigrant heritage, though I actually embrace two cultures — my mother Queenie, from rural Virginia, is descended from enslaved Africans. In 1915, my grandmother Lillian Odessa Birkett (who coincidentally had the same last name), a 21-year-old seamstress and the daughter of a white missionary from the UK and his Bajan wife, arrived at Ellis Island in New York Harbor, after making the long boat-trip from St. George’s parish, Barbados, in the British West Indies. The following year her future husband, Alexander Prince Birkett, a 33-year-old carpenter also from Barbados who did construction jobs all over the world (including on the Panama Canal), arrived, same place. They would meet, wed and raise 12 children, the third of whom was my father, Earl. My grandfather earned a living as a landlord in Harlem and a missionary travelling the world for a Christian church called the Brethren. He was a great benefactor in Harlem in his time and my grandmother was known for her gentleness and generosity. (Her godson is Charles Rangel, the longtime former NY congressman from Harlem.) When my father needed capital to start his manufacturing company, it was his father who provided the funding. Out of all the countries in the world that they both could have chosen to emigrate, England would have been the logical choice (I’d sound funny with a British accent though), but they chose America.

In my mind, what is the best part about the United States of America? It is not the multitude of ways to make obscene wealth or establish a position of comfort and respect, the outrageous bling, the seemingly endless varieties of physical land, its gargantuan military, or its enduring though very shaky democracy. The main reason why I chose Jersey City, New Jersey, as my home is because I love to be around the most diverse coupling of peoples in the entire country, perhaps the world. No offense to my native Long Island, but here I am good friends with individuals from every race, religion, background and most nationalities. My own personal care assistant, Khai (I am disabled, but more on that another time), is a Vietnamese immigrant who treats me like family. I am proud that, a short distance from my house, there is a Statue of Liberty with its inscription, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” That’s how I like to view America.

So it pains me when I hear people — including, of all people, blacks — complain about immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants South of the Border, as if they were freeloaders soaking up precious jobs and resources. I won’t dwell on the fact that Jesus was an illegal immigrant, or that we are all squatting on land occupied by indigenous peoples who arrived many millennia before us, I will just say that my favorite restaurant is Italian, my doctor is Pakistani, and my neighborhood looks like the UN. I like it like that.

At my Father’s factory in TriBeCa, maybe Easter 1963: Earl, grandfather Alexander, brother William, grandmother Lillian, sister Erlanda

America Needs to Repeal the Second Amendment

After 231 years, most of us are away of what is written in the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The amount of needless bloodshed bequeathed to America through the centuries from this one outdated and ill-advised sentence is incalculable. The slaughter of enslaved Africans and native tribes, the numerous wars, the senseless Western gun fights, the assassination of Presidents and other public figures, the settling of family and workplace disputes, the fight over turf, the desire to prove one’s manhood and the final solution to depression are all attributable to this one tragic sentence, and its continued enforcement by a misguided Supreme Court.

America is awash in guns – 400 million to be exact, nearly all of them owned by its 330 million inhabitants. They range in size and impact from single-shot handguns, shotguns and rifles to automatic weapons that parcel out bullets like falling water. All the bullets have the lethality to pierce the most secure body armor and turn human flesh into a red, bloody, unidentifiable pile of goo.

The sale and use of guns in the United States has reached levels of absurdity unprecedented in the modern world and all of human history, to the point where everyone is in danger of instant annihilation: men, women, black, white, yellow and brown, rich and poor, urban, suburban and rural, Republicans, Democrats and independents. Handguns mainly kill black kids. [See “Guns and The Black Male” in BAVUAL’s Preview Issue, Fall 2021] It is now easier to get a gun than a driver license. And with each senseless murder, the solution is either to reload and escalate arms or offer up prayers. It’s madness.

Conservatives who are responsible for this gun culture love to quote the Bible at us, so I have two Bible quotes for them as I offer my solution out of this mess. The first, from Job 38:11: and I declared: ‘You may come this far, but no farther; here your proud waves must stop’?

So, Stop. Repeal the Second Amendment and then amend it if you still want the right to own guns – the Constitution has already been amended 27 times, so make gun control number 28. Maybe not be as draconian as Australia, which has banned all guns outright – after all, America did try Prohibition for 14 years, and that was a disaster. However, guns are not needed in modern civilization, and definitely not AR-15s and other weapons of war. You want to shoot something, play a video game, or Laster Tag or a BB gun, not a lethal weapon. Which brings me to my second Bible verse, from 1 Corinthians 13:11:

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But, when I became a man, I put away the things of a child.

You are not a baby and a gun is not a toy. Time to grow up and put your toys away. If not, they should be taken from you.