PUTNEY — My mother is a refugee, and my father is also an immigrant. Whenever I see refugees coming to the USA, I identify with them.
Even though this is a country made up mostly of immigrants, xenophobia - like racism - still lives deep inside all of us. Many won't admit it, but it's true. Hard economic times tend to fan the flames of racism and xenophobia. So does certain kinds of rhetoric by politicians.
Certain types of charismatic leaders - like Hitler and Mussolini, for example - were very successful at sowing fear and hatred into millions of ordinary citizens during the 1930s and '40s.
What resulted was unspeakable suffering by millions of innocent people: Bloody world war, and a genocide we call the Holocaust. We refer to those leaders as “madmen” today.
Does the average American know enough history to recognize the face of fascism on the rise in our own country?
There's no reason why it cannot happen here. American history also includes genocidal land grabs, as well as our own brutal slavery and Jim Crow laws. Such brutal policies have already caused prolonged suffering by countless millions right here.
The racism, xenophobia, and fear already smolder in our country; all that's needed is a charismatic leader with the right kind of rhetoric to fan the flames.
Another “madman.”
* * *
At the start of World War II, my mother's Jewish family was displaced by Hitler from their home in what was then Yugoslavia.
While my grandfather joined the Yugoslav Army's hopeless fight against Hitler, my very young mother and several relatives escaped into Italy and were taken in by very kind people - ordinary people who, living under a fascist dictator, still risked their lives and their homes to take in a homeless family of “illegal” immigrants.
In Italy, the laws at the time of Mussolini were so anti-Jewish that any ordinary Italian would be shot for sheltering an alien Jew. Fortunately for my mother and her family, many of the people in that town had the bravery - and common decency - to thumb their noses at the fascist nonsense coming from the pompous, self-aggrandizing Mussolini.
My mother's family was allowed to hide out in Italy with false identities while the war raged on. They were never reported to the authorities. In 1944, Allied soldiers liberated the town.
* * *
As it turned out, my mother and her family were lucky in other ways, too.
Toward the end of the war, her father - my Jewish grandfather - escaped from his Nazi POW camp. Leaving no stone unturned, he was able to successfully hunt for his wife and daughters in Italy.
By then, they were living in a displaced-persons camp (which the Allies had set up in another part of Italy entirely); they continued living there, reunited as a family after the war, in search of a new home and a new life.
The United States was not the only country that would take in refugees displaced by World War II. Other surviving members of mother's family ended up in Canada, Israel, even back in Yugoslavia.
My grandparents, however, and a few others as well, saw the great promise of this country as a haven that would take them in, a land of opportunity.
When their father had secured a prospect of employment along with passage on a steamship, along came my teenaged refugee mother and her two refugee sisters to begin their new life in the USA.
* * *
My mother and her family's unusually fortunate story continued to unfold here in the U.S. Unlike the chapter during wartime in Italy, here they didn't have to rely so much on the decency of courageous strangers.
It was the 1950s, in the Boston area, where both my mother's parents, and her uncles and aunts as well, found meaningful employment, decent housing, and schools for the children.
They found themselves part of a community that respected, if not welcomed, them and provided them with the tools and opportunities necessary to contribute to society and to become full-fledged citizens.
There are as many refugee/immigrant stories in this country as there have been people arriving on our shores. Most of them were not as fortunate and fulfilling as my mother's story.
All too often, religious and racial minorities faced discrimination and hatred here: the millions of West Africans, kidnapped and brought against their will to a life of bondage; the Irish who arrived here half-starved and who then were treated like dirt. Think of the millions of peasants who travelled here in steerage, to live in filthy tenements and whose labor was the cheapest in town.
* * *
Fast forward 60 years or more, and it's unfortunate that our world is not much happier. Families are still being torn apart by devastating strife in many parts of the world, including the Middle East and Latin America. Individuals, fragments of their former families - sometimes unaccompanied children - find their way here in the United States. They hope they might find help in this wealthy, powerful country.
What will they find here?
How we treat “the other” says a great deal about our humanity, both on the individual level and as a society. We all know people who are suspicious of those who are different from us. On the other hand, just as many people are welcoming and even celebrate the differences that other people bring.
If our society is becoming more of one that fears the stranger, the racial, or the religious “other,” then I am deeply worried.
I am worried not only for those millions for whom we clearly should have room; I am also worried for what those of us already here will lose, since nearly all our immigrants end up contributing greatly and enriching us all.
Already, we have hundreds of thousands imprisoned in detention centers awaiting either deportation or a hearing. I hear the truly ignorant talk of building a wall on our southern border; there is also vicious talk of keeping out people who either follow the Muslim faith or who come from countries that do.
Now we have our own charismatic leader sowing hatred among the masses. He's pompous and self-aggrandizing. He is warning us that immigrants are out to take what we have and destroy us. He's pitching himself as a savior of us ordinary people (we former immigrants who managed to arrive here first), by keeping out the present-day immigrants, who are only doing what our own forebears naturally did.
This is 2016, not 1933. My mother and the rest of her family came here to escape the fascist state, not to create one.
If this so-called “leader” stands any chance of winning the election, I will cast my vote strategically this November. I will not sit passively if mass deportation or the other promised police-state crackdowns actually begin in this country. Will you?
In 2016, I would like to believe this hateful, pompous, self-aggrandizing madman is thoroughly unelectable, but now I'm not so sure.
Just take a look at history.