Regulation: ‘No children – guests must be 18 or over’.
On Monday we spent part of the day visiting some relatives, both well into their nineties, who were having a break at a hotel not far from us. The sign excluding children might as well have said, ‘Don’t bother if you’re under 50’. Later, we discovered that Mondays is a changeover day but as we entered the very crowded main reception and lounge, we were slightly overwhelmed by scores of people our own age, many of them with suitcases, waiting either to be let into their rooms or for taxis to take them on their journey home.
When we eventually found our relatives and four seats together, we had an opportunity to look around. It didn’t take long to realise that the guests at this resort hotel were almost all of a certain age. They were also entirely of the same socio-economic background and exclusively of the same ethnicity. It was more than children who were being excluded.
We hated it! So used have we become to living in an inter-generational community and a multi-racial, multi-ethnic society, to cultures with viewpoints different from our own, we feel far from ‘at home’ with a group of people who all looked and sounded pretty much like us! Later we looked at a review of the hotel chain,’ The average age of their clientele is probably between 70-75’.
We thought about this experience when the American election results were being announced. This once-great nation was built mostly by immigrants, ‘E pluribus unum' - out of many, one, words from the original constitution in 1776. Its diversity has made it the culturally rich melting pot it has become. Incredibly to us, it has now voted to hound out of the country the million or more migrants who are currently ‘illegals’ in the USA. This promise, we are told, along with promises on the economy, was what clinched this decisive majority.
It must be rather chilling to presumed illegal immigrants to know that even in the backwoods of America there will be millions of MAGA Republicans who will be willing to betray them to the authorities. Next step – deportation. They will be excluded. The American Dream will for them become a nightmare. And millions of insiders will cheer as they are forcibly ejected. It is not an idle threat.
We understand that an immigration policy of some kind is necessary, that people have to be excluded for perfectly practical and legitimate reasons. At weddings, parties, other social events, we all exclude others from our plans in many small ways all the time. We do not need to justify our choices. It is the rough-and-tumble of everyday life. Limitations on money, space, time, energy affect us all.
But the focus of policy in one of the world’s richest nations on forcible exclusion and repatriation, the exclusion of those who, with some strategic thought and planning it must be possible to include, seems both self-destructive to American society and totally inhuman. There are so many completely depressing aspects of the winning American election manifesto which will be divisive, create powerfully unequal societies and deprive many of hard-won freedoms, we cannot bear to contemplate them.
But none of us can afford to hide our heads in the sand! We often exclude because we are afraid. In the small worlds we all inhabit, we must do our best to live unafraid. That is not only the challenge for the American people. It is for all of us. In everyday practical decisions, often made on the spur of the moment, we can choose to include. The alternative is ghettos which will make our hotel experience on Monday seem like heaven. The exclusion route leads ultimately to despair.
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