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Title: Smell Something Burning?
Author: Eric K. Ward
Date: July 8, 2008
Language: en
Topics: Arizona, immigration, Bring the Ruckus
Source: Retrieved on March 14, 2019 from https://web.archive.org/web/20200126025415/http://www.bringtheruckus.org/?q=node/54
Notes: Originally posted at https://imagine2050.blogspot.com/2008/07/smell-something-burning-its-probably.html.

Eric K. Ward

Smell Something Burning?

Did you ever play the “If I had lived during [insert appropriate

historic period here] I would have ...” game? Back when I was a kid my

friends and I would sit in a tight circle often with popsicles juice

running down our fingers while we discussed how each of us would have

reacted to the Great Chicago Fire, escaped the Titanic, survived in the

Land of the Lost, or ran bootleg rum from Canada, though I’m sure we

didn’t even know what rum was.

As we grew older the game changed and took on even more significance. It

was no longer made up of fantasies of how I would have invested in

Disney and made it rich. Instead, I thought about how I might imagine

myself reacting to important moments in U.S. history. Actually it was

just one moment that fascinated me, the one called the Civil Rights

Movement. “Would I have been able to keep my cool desegregating a lunch

counter?” “Could I have worked up the courage and registered to vote

knowing that I might get a visit from the Klan that evening?” Would I

have left the comfortable confines of college to spend my summer in a

place that very well might cost me my life?”

Of course I was always full of bravado about what I “would have done” if

given the chance, but I made these boasts from the comfort of the

present — a nice place to explore “what if?” and “what may?” I don’t

think I’m alone in this and I still think many still wonder what they

might have done had they been in places called Selma, Montgomery,

Jackson and Boston.

In Arizona, like the tattered pages of an old paperback, the wondering

is long over. With over 181 bodies recovered in the deserts in 2007,

fifty five pieces of anti-immigrant legislation to be submitted in 2008,

and a local Sheriff who resembles Bull Connor (a southern police officer

and KKK member in the 1960’s) more than Wyatt Earp, Arizona is becoming

to immigrants rights, what Mississippi was to the 1960s civil rights

movement—a defining moment in which each of us will be called to either

embrace inhumanity or redeem the soul of America.

While I still wonder what I might do, others are acting. From day

laborers in Phoenix, Arizona, who face down the Sherriff and his posse

because they know that work is not a crime, to community members in

Flagstaff, Arizona who were detained last weekend for “disturbing the

peace” because they dared to honor the very meaning of the 4^(th) of

July by joining the annual 4^(th) of July parade.

Kaitlyn Fahrenbruch a spokesperson with The Coalition to Repeal took

part in the 4^(th) of July Parade with seven others to deliver a

declaration of their own (click to watch video). “Our goal is the repeal

all anti-immigrant laws; federal, state and local,” says Fahrenbruch “We

were marching in the defense of freedom for all people to live, love,

and work anywhere they please” she said. Is the message extreme? Maybe

it seems extreme to me, but then I remember English King George didn’t

take it very well when he was told a similar message about us

celebrating American Independence each year on the 4^(th) of July.

Beyond the debate on the economic pros and cons of immigration, I think

The Coalition to Repeal has realized something that I had forgotten.

That hundreds of people dying in the desert each year is extreme,

children coming home to empty kitchens where parents have disappeared is

extreme, beings jailed for seeking work is extreme. Asking that each

individual in our society be treated with basic human decency is not—it

is as American as apple pie. It’s what we have been seeking since 1776.

What would I have done had I lived in the 1960s? I guess I don’t have to

wonder anymore. Arizona, here I come!