Wearing your heart on your sleeve

From Roger Ebert:

I invite you to perform four easy thought experiments:

1. You and four friends are in Boston and attend the St. Patrick's Day parade wearing matching Union Jack t-shirts, which of course you have every right to do.

2. You and your pals are in Chicago on Pulaski Day, and wear a t-shirt with a photograph of Joseph Stalin, which is your right.

3. In San Francisco's Chinatown for the parade, your crowd wears t-shirts saying "My granddad was at the Rape of Nanking and all I got was this lousy t-shirt."

4. In Chicago for the Bud Billiken Parade, you and your crowd, back in shape after three hospitalizations, turn up with matching t-shirts sporting the Confederate flag.

...

[Y]ou and your buddies should try wearing the hammer and sickle on the Fourth of July. You could try it at a NASCAR race, for example.

Welcoming the stranger is a nation-defining decision

Valerie Elverton Dixon in Sojo.net:

The issue of illegal immigration in the United States requires an anti-logic of radical love.
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We ought to welcome them as brother and sister citizens.
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The question for me is: what would have happened had European-Americans welcomed African-Americans into the labor unions? What would have happened had they extended hospitality rather than violence?
History does not reveal its alternatives, but my guess is that race relations in the country would be very different. Cities would look very different. Knowing my own history, I say: welcome the stranger. Yes — they are not citizens of the United States as were African-Americans moving north during the Great Migration. However, they are human beings acting on the same human impulse to go where they can make a better life.