“What America does best is create Americans.”
– Bernard-Henri Lévy
I post pictures of these tacos all the time across social media, which are made by David. David makes his own sauces, his owns mixes and marinades. These are the best tacos in the world.
David is an immigrant. He has a wife and 2-year-old daughter. He does all of this, by hand, every day, and he makes $3.50 a taco, which isn’t a helluva lot. He works his ass off, like pretty much all of the immigrants who live in my neighborhood. They work construction, they work in restaurants, they take shit jobs that are beneath cushy white people like me.
David was originally working selling tacos outside of his building down the street, which is where a really popular local Salvadoreño restaurant was located, but it closed in order for the building to be seismically upgraded. It will come back, but for the mean time, some people are out of work. People just like David who work their asses off.
David now sets up his taco stand in a new location, having been welcome to do so outside the corner store – a store which is owned by a Yemeni national. He and his partner work really hard, work from 7 am to 2 am, just the two of them. They’ve managed to get some help recently, as the owner has finally managed to bring his family over to the U.S. after about a decade of trying and his two teenage sons also work in the store. And they had to get out, because Yemen is in chaos. With as much vile venom being spewed forth about “those kind of people” in this country, being in this country is still, without a doubt, better than being over there.
And the Yemenis who run the corner store are our friends. They are friends to everyone in this neighborhood – the whites and the blacks and the Latinos, the rich and the poor, even the police, some of whom I’ve noticed have taken to eating at David’s taco stand out front. They want a better life for themselves and their families, which is exactly what your ancestors and mine wanted when they came to this country.
These people are not my enemies, nor will they ever be. Where they may have come from does not make them my enemy. We make far too many enemies out of the people who are not, worrying about people from far away lands when it has been shown, time and again, that the real enemies often lie within.
But when you decide to cast people as enemies, based upon from where they come, it’s amazing just how many enemies you ultimately wind up creating. If you do that, they then come to see you as the enemy, and they are quite right to do that.
And if anyone who is reading this cannot comprehend this fact, then they should probably just unfriend me now, because as much as I appreciate speaking to a wide range of people with a wide range of views about a wide range of topics, and value that, and as much as I appreciate strenuous debate, someone who cannot understand this is clearly a fucking idiot, and is not worth one more goddamn ounce of my time.
And do not argue with me on this point. If you cannot see just how counterproductive, pointless, and fundamentally un-American this behavior has been which has come out of Washington, D.C. these past few weeks, then just leave this corner of cyberspace and carry on someplace else. Sorry to see you go – and I mean that will all sincerity – but I have nothing more to say to you. We have nothing left to say.
