Borders

Over my sixty years and a bit of life, I’ve crossed many borders. When I was a kid, shopping in Spain was a thing (because a lot of things were available there that weren’t in Portugal) so taking a bus to Spain to shop, with mom and all the other older village women was a thing. (I was along for two reasons: White Chocolate and mushrooms, most of them nearly impossible to obtain in Portugal at the time.)

I also traveled, by bus, plane, train and automobile. At the end of those trips (or in the middle) I had to haul out my passport or ID and show it to a bored border guard who would do the stamp stamp stamp thing.

But truly I’ve only ever crossed a border, one that can only be crossed once. Oh, sure, you can go back again, but the back isn’t there and what you’ll get is something third after crossing that other border. Which I have no intention of doing because I like who I am and what I am.

What in heck am I talking about? Acculturation. It’s an internal border which you cross mentally and emotionally over years. And once you’re done crossing it, you’re quite literally someone else on the other side.

I can’t imagine the circumstances that would force me to go back. Or rather, I can, but I’d rather not as it would involve a lot of deaths and devastation. But if I went back, I would be utterly foreign there. Other. I am when I visit. The country rubs me raw in a million small ways, and I’m sure I drive my surviving relatives — the only thing that would entice me to visit — bonkers in a million small ways that even they can’t articulate. Just “she’s annoying.” (I’d like to point out I was always annoying. BUT this annoying is deeper than the skin, something like fingernails rubbing on the blackboard of your soul.) My husband doesn’t feel it, possibly because he doesn’t have the scars where things were remodeled. To his mind, it is perfectly logical, should he retire in the next two years, if my dad is still alive, that we go over, say, for the whole summer. It’s warmer there, and we could go to the sea which both of us love, and I could spend time with my dad, whom he knows I love. Sure, it’s an alien culture, but he figures that’s okay because it’s temporary. I find myself in the curious position of explaining to him that after say 2 weeks I’d probably just start screaming and flipping off everyone and everything, and it wouldn’t be pleasant for anyone.

And it’s not that I hate Portugal. In the vast array of places I hate, for historic, cultural and justified reasons, Portugal barely moves the meter.

I’d say the discomfort is caused by the back of my mind feeling I SHOULD belong, and certain the people who know me expect me to belong. But I don’t. I don’t in a million small ways. I don’t even remember belonging, partly because our memories are plastic and unreliable, and partly because I never belonged very well (to be perfectly fair.) I never belonged as completely as I do here. And I left very young, and most of my life there was childhood or that curious transitional stage of “college student” which doesn’t have the same habits as an adult human being.

But the discomfort is real and continuous. It doesn’t bother me in other foreign parts (eh) where I’m curious but detached. I think mostly is the little of me that remains “Portuguese” culturally (maybe 5%?) is enough to feel like there are broken, jagged bits when exposed to the culture.

Which brings me right to what I want to talk about. Strap in, this is going to be a long one. In response to the inevitable (people or bots?) comments that I should be able to describe it in ten sentences, in precis format and perform it as a dance tune, I’d like to invite those making the comments to contemplate my middle fingers. I am sorry to deprive you of your pablum, but some things require complex treatment and adult humans know how to digest complex, often contradictory information.

Or if you prefer: an exploration of culture and acculturation partakes of the characteristics of the subject, which is complex, convoluted and not easy to standardize or summarize. Oh, and definitely not possible to summarize or shove into facile slogans.

So, my experience — from within — I am practically the ideal subject of acculturation (for a successful experience) and I had the best possible of circumstances in which to acculturate.

I came to the United States to stay at 22 when I married my husband. But before that, I’d been raised in the sphere of influence of an anglophile grandfather, surrounded by American songs and books. One of my earliest childhood iteneraria to what the world would be like was translations of Reader’s Digest, because my dad subscribed. I’ll point out that I have no idea if my dad knew I was reading them, but the words were accessible, reading material was in short supply, and so I read them cover to cover. (I also read my cousin’s bullfighter romances, so I wasn’t exactly a discriminating reader before 10.) Through it I absorbed a sort of idea of America as a golden land where wondrous things happened. In my mind, probably forever, is the image of one of those huge sixties landboat cars, with an entire family in it driving through the petrified forest. Oh, it was drawn because I think that particular issue was from the fifties, or maybe forties. Anyway, that was the background. I grew up — no revelation for anyone who is a regular — to love science fiction, and eventually grew up to prefer Robert A. Heinlein, with an intensity that means I practically grew up IN his books. Add to that the fact I’d fallen in love with English as a language, so despite having only 4 years when I came to the US as an exchange student, I was fluent enough that I started dreaming in English (the mark of having switched the language you’re thinking in, and a landmark we were taught to look out for) during my “orientation” the first week in the country. It never went back either. My dreams that have childhood memories have everyone speaking English. It’s weird. I came to the US at 18 and spent a year as an exchange student, and met my future husband. I only didn’t stay/make more permanent arrangements like getting married, because my husband and I met at 18 and we were geeks with very little dating experience. The attraction was immediate but the attraction itself caused us to almost run the other way because it was scary. Four years after I’d returned to Portugal and gone to College for English (and German) we got in touch by phone, realized we were being idiots, because this was the only other person we’d ever been able to talk to COMPLETELY and got married within six months.

Since then I’ve lived in the US, in North Carolina, South Carolina, Colorado and none of your business (not that the secret is particularly hard or fast, but there are reasons.) Yes, each time I moved there was a cultural adjustment, but not at the same level as coming from Portugal.

Despite more or less being mad in love with America, as much as with my husband, I didn’t naturalize until five years and change after I got married, barely beating older son at an American citizenship.

So: My case is practically ideal. I was acquainted with the culture at a distance. Now, most people are all over the world, because of US cultural dominance, but that’s mostly to movies which are often misleading, and besides don’t let you figure out how people are “ticking” to the level a book does. (Even if the person whose ticking you hear is most often the author.) And once I’d come to the US I was isolated from all Portuguese cultural influences, save for phone calls with family, which got more sparse with time because they were very expensive, and the occasional visit for a week or two, which also got more and more rare because money and the dislocation attendant in taking that much time off (often for both of us, when we were both in 9-5 jobs.) The person I interacted with the most is American, with no Portuguese background (yeah, his 23andme has different opinions, but it’s like saying I have a connection to Norway. Sure, but it’s from several hundred years ago, and whatever influence it has is buried deep in genetic propensities. I’ll probably find my obsession with axes comes from there. Never mind.) In fact, the Mathematician is so American his ancestors were here before the revolution (look, some really were here a while before) and one of them fought for the revolution during the revolutionary war. (Very proud.) Add to that that there was no Portuguese community near us, or if there was, I never heard of it. The only time I was contacted by a Portuguese “local” group was in Colorado Springs, and I declined to belong, mostly because by then I was raising my son, and there was no point confusing him. Having me for a mother is weird enough. BUT ALSO because they weren’t the same kind of Portuguese. They were from Azores, which is a related (obviously) but completely different culture. Kind of like if you lived in Germany and your only contact with the US was a group from NYC, while you were a born and bred Texan. If I had been longing for Portugal and very lonely, I might have signed up, who knows? But at that point, 8 years into my marriage, I was very firmly acculturated. I had no interest in attending Portuguese feasts (except for the occasional, strange desire for charcoal grilled sardines. I got nothing. That itch gets scratched when friend Mongo grills some for me. Note my husband despises the dish, so I never make it. Too much trouble to make just for me.)

This is particularly curious because in the four years after I went back to Portugal, after my exchange student year, I did in fact cleave to any displaced American or American raised person I could find. My university group of such had… A team watching parties on Saturday afternoon. Yes, it was that bad.

So, given all that, when I married acculturation was instant and easy. Wait. Wait. Okay, I had to get that laugh out of my system.

Acculturation was slow, torturous, and often felt like I was going insane or coming apart at the seams. It affected EVERYTHING from what I ate for breakfast, to initial approach to strangers, to asking for information on how to do something (if I could have had youtube!) to how I dressed, to how I walked, talked, stood. To how we resolved marital disputes, or more commonly minor disagreements. To medical treatment. To– EVERYTHING.

Being from a different culture — remember Portugal is at that a WESTERN European culture. I shudder at doing this from somewhere more distant — and trying to fit in — not just live as I always had, and damn the torpedoes — is much like being a centipede who has forgotten which leg to move first, and then has to think through every leg movement.

In the long watches of the night, when we revisit all the things we’ve done wrong, I often revisit what must have been baffling amalpropisms and social solecisms I committed the first three years in the US. Baffling for other people, that is. For me, they made perfect sense. I’ve only recently learned to start laughing at them.

Everything is affected? EVERYTHING. At a level you don’t fully understand until you come against every small thing you’re not even doing wrong: you’re doing it as if you came from another planet.

And you adapt. Step by step. Point by point. Sometimes without noticing. Sometimes with tears, screams and a great wish you were two and could throw yourself on the floor and kick and scream.

If you’re in a happy long term marriage to someone from across the country, you’ve experienced a very small and pale version of this. The adapting. Step by step. I bet if your self before you married met yourself now, he/she would be baffled at how different you are. NOT that you are different of course, you just really like bagels for breakfast now. What’s wrong with that?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. But you’ve changed. Well, now multiply that by a million.

In my case, once I was adapted enough that a visit told me I’d never fit in Portugal again, I went through citizenship. And I was — I want to emphasize this — fitting in fine for every day life. But there followed another five years of solid hell before I could “write” American. Before that writing an American character came across as “not even wrong.” (Look, no one was accepting the Elly chronicles. And frankly back then I wrote them so ALIEN that they wouldn’t have been enjoyable. I’m not sure the latest book, halfway done, doesn’t suffer from this, too. But the book is helping me, because my mind is unsettled with the approaching elections.)

This entailed not reading fiction — I read an awful lot of it, of course — but reading biographies. Oh, not important people biographies. Those are glossified to the point of not-real.

If you look in the dusty corners of your local library you’ll find “biographies of rando”. I.e. people write their auto biographies and give a copy to their local library. (Some have cookbook type ring bindings. Or did. It occurs to me libraries might no longer be accepting these. If so, it’s a pity. They were a real historical resource.) I read these compulsively at the rate of several a week. That helped.

Raising the boys also helped, as I experienced an American childhood second hand. Which is why I sometimes come across as having grown up in the nineties. Whatever, dudes.

Anyway, at this point, I am acculturated. Living in the US does not feel painful. It’s normal. If you drop me anywhere in the US with enough funds, I can establish my routine easily enough. (Though without my husband it would be weird, because it’s been 41 years and we’re a unit.) (I’ll also find the best diner in the neighborhood. Blindfolded. With my feet in a bucket. Except here, because this town doesn’t have a diner. Sad Sarah noises.)

Portugal? Ah… once, in an adventure in the mountains, looking for a castle (they’re better marked now that Portugal is super-touristic, but not back then) my husband and I about starved because the village was small enough not to have standard signs, and I couldn’t figure out which of what looked like houses was actually a tavern/restaurant. (Yes, there was one. My father laughed at my not being able to find it afterwards.) I could NO LONGER READ the cultural signs. So we beat feet to the nearest largish population center and bought sandwiches at a restaurant.

Am I FULLY acculturated? Oh. No. I’d rate it 95%. The other 5%, the parts that aren’t around food, I hit when I do something that my husband stares at and goes “Why did you think that was the way to do x?” And I’m so far off the beaten path that normal Americans can’t decode it. And, of course, I have the memories. And the scars.

Now, why did I put you through this? The usual “People running with stupid on social media and putting my eyes out.”

This one was a few weeks ago someone on Facebook, and I’m still smarting from it. First, she started by informing everyone we should unfriend her, if we agreed with what ICE was doing.

(Pinches bridge of nose.) Okay, I’m going to say it. Demanding other people unfriend you if they x y or z is one of the most stupid, arrogant, bizarre, backward things you can do on social media.

Why, what do I mean? It’s so common! Yes, it is. So is bad breath and spitting in public. It don’t make it right.

Look, social media, particularly the notoriously unreliable facebook, is not going to show your prissy, preening post to your entire “friends” list. On top of which some number in your friend list will look at your stompy foot fit and go “Whatever. You’re not important enough for me to navigate to your page and unfriend you or block you.” So if your intent was to really have these bad evil thinkers unfriend you, this is quite possibly the most stupid way to do it.

BUT that’s not what you want, no. What you want is to throw a fit and show how superior you are to those people who think ICE should be allowed to arrest those illegally in this country, and to be patted, cosseted and comforted by people as vapid and as stupid as you are.

Again, whatever dude(tte in this case) except that the wish to exhibit how stupid and ignorant you are strikes me as a weird form of fetish, but you do you.

How very dare I? Indeed.

I dare because this post was a weird combination of “reports of things that never happened”, inaccurate historical comparisons, and hissy fit that other people dared have opinions that diverged. And it was followed by comments just as deranged and bizarre.

This person was convinced ICE is roaming around the cities, arresting everyone who tans and putting them in camps. I don’t know how crazy you have to be, or in how deep in deepest whitest suburbia you have to live to believe that. Because you know, a casual stroll out my front door brings me in contact with many many people who tan darker than I do when I have been in the sun (about the color of well done toast with butter. If I’ve been in the sun, which I haven’t really in a while) and who aren’t cringing, hiding behind bushes, running from ICE or looking even vaguely worried. And younger son, who inexplicably is darker than both husband and I and as dark as my dad, has only had ONE unpleasant incident. And not with ICE, but with a neighbor where he used to live, who belligerently asked if he was Jewish.

So, I’d guess this person who posted on facebook lives somewhere where everyone is blond and blue eyed? I don’t know. Are there even places like that? Maybe affluent areas of Minnesota? Perhaps?

Then she objects that the people arrested are kept in “camps” in inhumane conditions. Now, I’m going to admit that having had people go into detention camps and report the water is fine is not proof they are decent, humane places. How can we forget Walter Duranty and his visit to the Soviet Union. BUT the people who have been taken to these camps to poke around are usually at least mildly adversarial. And there is, honestly, no footage from all the democrats who’ve BROKEN into the places that reveals they’re not. And there would be footage, when everyone has a phone in their pocket.

HOWEVER and besides all that: Why do these camps exist at all? Well, because bleeding hearts and their pet judges demand that illegals be kept in there while they’re given “due process” to reverse and illegal action they took.

And kindly refrain, as the idiot comments on this post told me, that coming in illegally is “A misdemeanor, like going ten miles an hour over the speed limit.” I don’t know the legal classification of illegal entry, but I can tell you the misdemeanor is for overstaying your visa under some circumstances. (Not even all.) I can also tell you under the conditions the mass immigration took place, particularly under autopen, it is impossible for an illegal to live in the US without committing other crimes, big and small, from stealing an identity, to claiming benefits you’re not entitled to, to much darker stuff, particularly since most of them were brought in by people affiliated with gangs who then demand repayment in various ways.

Going on about how they’re exemplary mothers and fathers, as though the ability to reproduce confers civic virtue is not only wrong but misguided.

Worse, by being brought in, most of these people are open to horrific forms of exploitation, ranging from outright slavery, to having to do a solid by driving something somewhere for the friendly drug lord in your neighborhood.

On top of which, as far as I understand, if people put in these camps say “I agree to go back” the “imprisonment” is done, they get their ticket and are (I think flown) sent home.

Comparing this to the Holocaust is not only offensive. It’s demented. Jews had to escape in dangerous, scary ways, if they could escape at all. Reading some of these stories makes your hair curl. And a Portuguese ambassador (memorialized among the Righteous Gentiles) got expelled from Germany because he was giving Portuguese birth certificates and passports to every Jew who asked. (And bless the man, he let his itinerary be known when he was expelled, took a stops-at-every-stop train and threw birth certificates and passports out of the window at the waiting crowd with name to be filled in by the person who caught it.)

Also most Jews had nowhere else to go, except the country that had suddenly and inexplicably decided to destroy them. They didn’t have a country they’d come from only a couple of years ago and where they still had relatives to welcome them with open arms.

Before you wave the historical bloody shirt, make sure it is the right bloody shirt. And stop ripping bloody shirts that don’t fit you off the back of people who weren’t in your little deranged club.

But more importantly, listen up: Mass immigration is a horrible deal. It’s a horrible deal for the country these people leave (no? I have reason to know. The Portugal of my childhood lost so many men that harvest was sometimes impossible, in certain regions.) It’s horrible for the country receiving them, where they depress wages at best, and become welfare recipients in a system they never paid to or are forced into a life of crime and/or degradation at worst.

And it’s a horrible deal for the people themselves. Without any interest in becoming one of us, adapting, or working to fit in, they’re thrown out into a vast, complex, alien culture. Most end up believing the people in the host country are treating them badly for no reason (not because they violate a million small rules. Or because it’s not bad treatment at all, just not what they are used to) and resenting the country and the people at a deep level, which often passes on to their kids and their grandkids. On top of which, few are fluent in English, so they CAN’T navigate the society or the integration in society and become AT BEST second class citizens, bereft of the opportunities they could have that. If this weren’t enough, they are often exploited by college-style marxoids who convince them they’re owed everything on a gold platter, which again just feeds the resentment and the feeling of being hard-done-by.

AND all of the above is ignoring again conditions of near slavery or sexual exploitation, or inducement into criminality at various levels, which is extremely common and easy for these people to fall into.

Which brings me to: Listen up: Yes, I approve of what ICE is doing. In my opinion they’re not doing enough of it. And also the petty judges arguing that people should have every measure of “due process” should be… disbarred. Yes, disbarred is a good term. The way of doing it going through my mind owes to much to my Roman ancestry and you don’t need to hear it.

The best, most humane way of dealing with this is to apprehend the person, do every possible due diligence to establish whether they have citizenship or a legal right to be here. If they don’t, yeet them over the border. By bus, train, airplane or car, of course. I’m not a monster. (Most of the time.) You don’t actually need to care where they go. They just can’t stay here.

And if you’re sitting there thinking it’s very weird for someone who is largely libertarian to say this…. Have another think.

Yes, in principle, people should be able to cross the border and seek a better life anywhere they choose. In an ideal, platonic world, this would be possible. Probably.

Because there remains another problem: There isn’t an ideal, platonic, ideal of humans. HUMANS ARE NOT WIDGETS.

Culture — which is the important meaning codified in Nationality — is not bestowed at birth by some sort of magical “be born on the right dirt” (which brings us to a whole other discussion.)

We are baptized into our culture from about ten seconds after we are born, by how we’re held, who nurses us, how we’re handled, who talks to us and how, who talks about us and how.

Before you can even talk a lot of internal impressions of how the world is and what to expect are formed.

Now, initially these are small and relatively easy to overcome. No, really. Take a child from China, a child from Sweden and a child from Uganda, all about 3 months of age, and give them to an American couple to raise. Other than getting very weird looks in the supermarket, this will be an American family. And the racists who are going to wail the results will be different for each child…. yes, they will. As they would to a normal family with different siblings. Look, yes, there might be some genetic propensity to some character traits, but those are traits like Openness and Neuroticism not “will love science.” And anyway, the propensity is only slightly increased in certain populations. Each region contains multitudes with it. (And most international IQ tests administered are administered with intent and malice. As someone who used to GIVE IQ tests to people, it’s so easy to get the result the tester wants. Like in most social science.)

However around age three, something changes. From that age on, it’s much harder for children to acculturate. And it becomes harder every year after that. (One of the reasons I’m mildly salty I didn’t stay at 18 is that I was losing my accent. But the four years back baked it into stone. I’ll never lose it.)

Now all this changes with individuals, of course, and as I said above, even an adult can acculturate, if willing to pay the price.

The problem is MASS migration. One or two people, or even a family will adapt, easily enough, enough for daily life. (Most people don’t want to be fiction writers. I know. It baffles me too!)

The problem gets harder with every person added to that group. I’m not dissing your great great grandmother who immigrated to NYC with her entire Italian village. But if you go back over that history, you find the family didn’t even fully acculturate until the third generation. Even if they didn’t speak Italian (Or Northern Scrolladian) at home, the kids had a foot in each culture, and it was only the grandkids who could integrate. If they married outside the group, if they went to college, if–

Now in the ideal state of affairs, this wouldn’t prohibit open borders and allowing a person and or his family to relocate to the place where they feel at home. As I did.

And in the ideal state of affairs, I’d enthusiastically approve. Because humans should be allowed to go where they want and feel happiest.

The problem is that the world is not ideal, and our world is very far from ideal. Due, partly, to dysfunctional cultures and partly to a socialist infection of vast portions of the world, including the West, including ourselves, most of the world is what can only be described as an economic basket case, with variations in how baskety the case is. We’re slightly better off than the rest.

Slightly better off is enough to make us an attractive destination for…. well, most of the world.

The problem is that those countries aren’t basket cases just because the magical location fairy put them in that particularly dysfunctional dirt. Or because they lack “natural resources” that were “stolen by colonizers” (Again, look at my middle fingers. Then ask Japan or Singapore about their natural resources.) In the end the most important natural resource is people. When infected by dysfunctional cultures — and socialism — humans create dysfunctional, shithole countries.

The problem is that the US — with open borders — will attract… everyone. And no one will acculturate. Nor can they, btw. Even isolated it’s very hard, and right now every part of the culture and officialdom CHIDES you and REVILES you for trying to. (Trust me on this)

And people bring their cultures in their heads. They can’t help it. Importing everyone just means the US will be like everywhere else.

And there’s nowhere else for us to go.

Oh, I’m perfectly willing that in the glorious future, where every place is free, there is no need for borders. I’d like that to happen.

That is not where we live.

So, for now, borders are a necessary evil. Immigration, if and when it happens, should be on an individual basis. Small family at most.

AND every immigrant should have his VISA stamped with FIFO. Fit in or Fuck off.

Or we’ll all find ourselves with no place to fit and no place to call home.