Friday Food for Thought #18

Timid Bigots

It's official, I'm pissed.  In 2010, I decided that my hometown was one of the most backward and idiot places on this Earth.  Just a few days ago, they confirmed it once again.

You see, my hometown is Fremont, Nebraska.  You may have heard mention of it in the news this week.  What I'm about to say is the truth, at least so far as I see it.

Fremont, Nebraska is a cesspool.  59.7% of the voting public in the town are either bigots or fools, and I'm becoming more and more certain that it is the former rather than the latter.  They’re probably both.

The Town

I live within a stone's throw of the Metropolitan Building (the building where the city council actually meets).  The area is officially considered a 'blighted area', a term used to get federal assistance for local improvements.  What is telling is that while I wouldn't call the neighborhood really 'good' it wasn't what I'd call 'blighted' or 'bad' at least not until recent years.

Economically, Fremont is in a rut and has been for a long time.  While unemployment here has been stable at around 4%, a look at the town shows that this is a bit of a misleading statement.  The largest employer in town is Hormel, a meat packing plant that sits south of town, but besides the meatpacking field almost all the local jobs are various service sector jobs - especially in fast food.  The downtown has become partially dependent on federal grants for improvements (though the only improvement I've seen has been special handicap useable sidewalk ramps).  This isn't to say the local government is without money.  They seem to have no problem having one of the largest police forces I've ever heard of for a town of 26,000.

We have a waterpark, a mall, a YMCA that's truly enormous, a college, and so forth.  Overall that seems pretty good, at least from a quick cursory glance.  The truth is that if you scratch beneath that surface the town is pretty rotten.  The one part of that list I just gave that I can't really complain about is the local YMCA.

Fremont has long been controlled by a select group of older and wealthier families, people that have over years and in some cases generations accumulated wealth from all sorts of local businesses.  I wouldn't call them fat cats or 'big players' as they're basically nothing in the overall scheme of things outside of the town itself.  Among the many objectives this group has had was real-estate development, especially to the east of town. 

It’s not an unusual thing for smaller towns to have people like this.  My father liked to refer to them as the ‘Real-Estate’ Mafia.

Since I was in middle school I've seen a number of different ploys to get the city government to pay for basic infrastructure to make real-estate development easier.  Among these ploys was the construction of a new Middle School over a mile outside of town, followed by the construction of the water-park.

Fremont Splash Station has a long history, if people here cared to remember it.  I can't remember who had the original idea, but certain members of the community here decided they wanted a water park in town.  After a couple years of campaigning for it, a bond issue was brought up for vote and promptly shot down.

Then things got a little crooked... You see, at the time Fremont had two pools.  One of them, Memorial, was a massive pool equipped with slides and a capacity that dwarfed the second pool... Ronin.  Soon after the bond issue for the water park failed, something odd happened... Memorial pool was shut down and the land it was on sold to the YMCA, which began to build a large indoor skating rink on the location.

Then Ronin, the only remaining pool in town was suddenly massively overcrowded during the summer.  If that wasn't enough a study showed that Ronin was beginning to show its age, despite being significantly newer then Memorial.  Suffice to say, ultimately... Fremont Splash Station was built across the street from the new Middle School.

It's never really been that popular or even profitable as far as I know.  I think I’ve been there less than ten times since it opened.

When the new Middle School was opened one of my sisters ended up among its first class.  I remember her telling a story about how when the first snow fell, hundreds of field mice flooded the school, taking cover from the cold out in the corn fields that surrounded the school inside the building.  Among other problems there were massive traffic snarls getting to and from school, often times taking over an hour to get in and out at the start of the day.

I'll have more on the insanity of Fremont Nebraska Schools later... They deserve their own section.

I mentioned a mall, what I didn’t mention was any stores in it.  This is because the Fremont Area Mall is practically empty most of the time.  The most common reasons for anyone to visit the mall are to go to the movie theater inside or to the Chinese restaurant inside, Imperial Palace.

There’s even a store front in the mall that lies empty, and has for years.

I should note this restaurant is owned and operated by immigrants.  I mention this because if you list all the start up small businesses in Fremont, most of them are either created by immigrants or created to serve immigrants.  Almost all the other job growth in town seems to be provided by corporations and franchises.

This does not look like a quiet community or a nice suburb to Omaha.  It looks like a town slowly transitioning from a ‘bedroom’ community of retirees into a slum of sorts.  Keeping immigrants out will only accelerate this decline, as they are one of the driving factors for business creation in the town.

The College

I have a Bachelors degree in English from Midland Lutheran University, the college in town.  My father worked for twenty-five years as a professor of business and economics from the school before being forced to retire.  I know the faculty, or at least I did…  The school I went too and graduated from in 2008 no longer exists.  Oh there may be a few faculty members left and some staff, but the school I went to no longer exists.  It’s now Midland University, a transition that was made under the current Nebraska senate candidate Ben Sasse.

My father has the early stages of Parkinson’s, a condition that was only detected last year.  The year before that, Ben Sasse pressured him to retire.  There are few people in this state that have gathered the enmity of my family quite as much as Ben Sasse.

I laugh at the idea that Sasse is anti-establishment.  Have you seen his background? The man got his Bachelors from Harvard, and went overseas to Oxford in England.  He owns property in Washington and worked as part of the Bush Administration.  In short, HE IS THE ESTABLISHMENT.

Midland has long suffered under incompetent administrations, whose various schemes would backfire on the College, usually with severe fiscal problems.  I for one am just glad he will soon be gone from the place and therefore can’t cause any more damage to my school.

The Schools

I had some great teachers growing up.  People like Terry Boeck, Fred Robertson, Mrs. Shanks, Justin Bigsby, Mrs. Dodd, and Mr. Campbell.  Most of them are gone now, retired… moved on, and one of them is even dead.

Terry Boeck liked to say he was ‘older than dirt’ and he was what a Middle School level Social Studies teacher should be.  I will admit that my grades weren’t the best in his class, but then I was a complete twerp in Middle School.  He liked to challenge the students in class, using his own knowledge to contradict most of what his students thought.  In short, he would have been the absolute best possible government teacher.

He’s dead now, but one story he told me still sticks with me.  It really shows just what is wrong with Fremont.  When we were talking about the Civil Rights movement, he told the story of how the very first black family in town was run out of town by a mob.

They’re all gone now or moved on to administrative positions.  Those few that still are in the classroom are a rarity, working alongside people that’s skill at teaching are apparently becoming more and more lackluster.

Did you know we have a debate and English teacher that is married to a registered sex offender?  I’ve heard reports that the superintendent’s wife, a high school teacher, manhandled a kid?  My younger sisters tell about how most of their teachers leave school immediately at the end of the day, unwilling to stick around to help students or supervise clubs.

Next year, all students will be let out an hour early on Wednesdays so that the teachers can stay for consultations or something… No wonder our test scores are so catastrophic.  It’s insane.

The Bigots

Then, an older gentleman in a checkout line gruffly told her to speak English when she was talking to her kids in Spanish. And a clerk at a thrift store told her they didn't have bathrooms for brown people, she said.

Omaha World Herald, February 13^th, 2013

Nathalie Martinez, 24, of Fremont Nebraska works as a Dental Assistant.  Above is what she told the Omaha World Herald happened after the 1^st vote on the anti-immigration ordinance.  When I first heard this, I was horrified, but not surprised.  The atmosphere here is toxic in its view on Mexicans.  I remember my best friend for many years talk about ‘thieving mexicans’ and so forth.  All that talk made me uncomfortable, and I didn’t speak out.

Now I have to.

All American Immigration laws have been motivated by racism.  The very first limit on Immigration was the Immigration Act of 1917, which explicitly barred Asian Immigration.  The next major act was the Immigration Act of 1924, which set a quota system where only a limited number of immigrants could enter the United States.  The way the quota was calculated set it up so that it was derived by the ethnicity of current US residents.  As a result, it dramatically slashed the number of Irish and Southern European Immigrants, while largely leaving English immigration alone.

These restrictions were largely unchanged until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which basically set up the current system.  A system which I think is one of the most idiotic ones in the world.  There is a national quota of immigrants allowed into the United States, something that I'm sure would shock our founders.  After all, they're the ones that made it so being born in the United States automatically granted citizenship, no matter how much certain people want to pretend that they didn't.

The act was initially vetoed by President Truman, but I think we call all do well to remember what he said then in his Veto Message:

"Today, we are 'protecting' ourselves as we were in 1924, against being flooded by immigrants from Eastern Europe. This is fantastic... We do not need to be protected against immigrants from these countries–on the contrary we want to stretch out a helping hand, to save those who have managed to flee into Western Europe, to succor those who are brave enough to escape from barbarism, to welcome and restore them against the day when their countries will, as we hope, be free again....These are only a few examples of the absurdity, the cruelty of carrying over into this year of 1952 the isolationist limitations of our 1924 law.

In no other realm of our national life are we so hampered and stultified by the dead hand of the past, as we are in this field of immigration."

Who are we to deny the liberty we have to others who strive for it by moving here? How can we deny the Mexican fleeing drug violence in their homeland? How can we deny the Muslim woman fleeing the persecution of Saudi Arabia? A quota or waiting list is a denial, no matter how much these native bigots try to spin the truth.  Yes the Immigration Act of 1952 is a law, so were the Black Codes.  I say the illegal immigrants who came here to escape are heroes.

By acting to enforce it, by saying... You must follow this unjust law. YOU, THE VOTING CITIZENS OF THIS TOWN HAVE DECLARED IN A LOUD VOICE THAT: WE ARE BIGOTS AND RACISTS.  You are the villains here, and may you burn in hell for your persecution of your fellow man!

Amen.