Where’s the sense in it?

I’m only two weeks away from moving to France, and there will be much more about that soon. I hope to be riding my little MP3, the one I used to roll around the isles. I’ll be able to go to all those great European meetings, and especially Paddy Tyson’s wonderful event in August near Oxford.  But first I need to unburden myself and seek guidance from those who understand my perplexity.

There are people who don’t like me to talk about politics, or religion, or anything else important except bikes. But I can’t go against my nature.

As I prepare to leave California I think more and more of my reasons for coming here in the first place 35 years ago.

It wasn’t really America I was coming too, it was very specifically California, and not even the star-struck  beach-boy Southern California that most people envisage when they think of the West Coast, but  very much the under-populated land of mountains, streams, forests and bears in the north of the state, where I had spent such happy months in 1975.

I remember clearly that one of the great attractions for me was that it was only a hop, step and jump from South America. The truth is that, but for some real, practical difficulties,  I would have moved to Colombia, and I imagined riding down there every now and again.

In those days the prospect of hopping on a bike and riding a few thousand miles through several countries was no more daunting to me than a trip to the nearest Costco. Quite honestly, that is no exaggeration. I was so confident of my ability to negotiate all the little obstacles that might come my way that they didn’t figure in my calculations. It was just a question of taking the time and a bit of money.

Perhaps that’s why I never did it. It was too easy. It could wait. There were other things to do first. I was newly married, with a baby on the way, and was looking for a fresh start  in life.  It was less than three years since I had come back from my big journey, 18 months since I had finished writing the book, a year since I had married. The idea was that we would begin something new, far away from the problems that had shadowed our life in France.

Of course I did do that Latin journey in reverse, when I went round the world again twenty years later, coming up from Chile to Arizona, but by then a whole new lifetime seemed to have elapsed. In the meanwhile Mexico and several other countries south of the border had come to me.

My valley in California, and indeed the whole county of Mendocino, is full of Mexicans. The fact that marijuana flourishes here naturally attracts some less savoury types as well, but that’s equally true of the indigenous white population. On the whole I have to say that I really like Mexicans. Both here and in Mexico I find them to be very nice people – nicer even than white Americans, and certainly nicer than me, because their niceness is achieved without effort. Watch them in a crowd. They are happier, because they wear their empathy on their sleeves.
And they work hard.

So, as I prepare to leave this country I find myself utterly bewildered in the middle of a quite outrageous and bizarre primary election season, and one of the things that strikes me most forcibly is the farcical nature of the arguments about immigration.

Now that Marco Rubio seems to have gathered strength and looks like having a chance, my only reason for writing this is to point out the absurdity of his position.

His parents were Cuban. They left Cuba for the USA, before the the time of Castro, presumably because they wanted a better life. No doubt they immigrated legally, but there is also no doubt that Rubio would defend all those Cubans who fled Castro’s Cuba and arrived in Florida illegally, to be greeted as heroes. Given a different accident of timing, his parents would probably have been among them.
Almost all those people were economic refugees, just like the millions of Mexicans and others from south of the border who came here to support their families. Yet, according to Rubio, these people from the south are all criminals who should be given hell and sent packing. Cruz is no better, and Trump’s xenophobia is so obviously manufactured (trying to whip up up this anger I’m supposed to be feeling) that it’s beneath contempt.

Right now, Europe is struggling to welcome a few million refugees from the most bitter of wars, where civilians are routinely bombed, gassed, starved and enslaved. Absorbing them is a difficult and painful process. Generally speaking, most Europeans recognize that they have a responsibility to help, but there have been powerful reactions, and demonstrations. Obviously, among these millions, there are bad apples, and there have been some well-publicized crimes committed, which have forced several governments to put new limits on the flow. Nobody yet knows how it will be accomplished.

The United States, on the other hand, has unintentionally absorbed about eleven million people, most of them Latinos, in a relatively peaceful process – people who have adapted well and work hard. They have become a cornerstone of society. There are many who believe that if the undocumented were all magically spirited away (I imagine a sort of Trumpian Rapture) the American economy would all but collapse.

You would think that  America – the USA – should be proud of it’s ability to offer these millions a safe life, an opportunity to work hard and prosper, and to contribute to the American economy. Instead we have a trio of bombastic, self-righteous, puritanical  (you can pin the labels where they belong) men proposing the most preposterous and unworkable schemes, and screaming in the face of reason.

And the worst of it is that a lot of people seem to believe them. This isn’t a matter of liberal versus conservative. It’s common sense versus lunacy.