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Why All the Shouting?

Once upon an actual time,
while living in Berkeley, California--
a student at a theological seminary--
I enrolled in a short course at U.C. Berkeley
in beginners' Swedish.  I do not know why.
All of my foreskins (as Stan says it)
were from Norway.  It might have been
because Norwegian was not offered.

The instructor laughed pleasantly and said
that my attempts to pronounce Swedish
sounded Norwegian.  I thought that odd,
because I could not speak Norwegian.
But then I realized that my father was born
in Norway, and my mother's parents
and grandparents were from Norway, too.
My great-grandmother never spoke English,
and nearly everyone else did so with an accent.
"Ja," my Dad might have said, but probably didn't,
"it kind of sticks vitt you."  It stuck vitt me.

I did learn Norwegian, later, in the college
where I taught, first from Harald Jensen,
a Norwegian born instructor, and later
from Audun Jensen, unrelated to Harald,
but also a Norwegian native.  Still later,
I spent a year at the University in Oslo,
and later still, taught for a year at
Nansen College in Lillehammer.

Returning from Norway, one time,
I spoke Norwegian with my father for the first time.
He laughed, not altogether pleasantly--he was
not altogether pleasant--and said that
my Norwegian was not real Norwegian:
it was bookish, not as he spoke it, growing up
on an island outside of Bergen.  Uncle Hans agreed.
He was not altogether pleasant about it, either.
Hans, born in America, spoke a residue of
Norwegian carried to America by my mother's family,
from Trøndelag, farther north in Norway.

I think about such trivial and ordinary things--
millions of families in America can tell such stories,
not just about Norway and Sweden, but Mexico,
and England, and Germany and Scotland and Japan
and Africa, and almost everywhere in the world.

That is who we are.
We are no one else.
It is a fact
that sticks vitt you.

Of course, every once in a while,
usually when things really get sticky,
when former slaves get uppity,
or Germans go off their hinges
and decide it is the fault of Jews,
or when Japan bombs Pearl Harbor,
of when we notice that some of our
neighbors do not look like us,
or pronounce English the same vay vi due,
people get really unpleasant.  Sometimes . . .
sometimes they get their guns,
or cans of gasoline, or quotes from god.

That is why the Kønigs changed their name to King.
That is why we built concentration camps
on the West Coast, for Japanese Americans.
That is why Donald Trump wants to build a wall.
That is why two guys from India, who live and work
in Kansas, were shot while having a drink together.

Donald Trump doesn't want to build a wall
between us and Mexico to preserve the English language:
he is the most inarticulate President I can recall.
It isn't because immigrants are a danger:  they aren't.
We have met that enemy, and as Al Capp said,
"they are us".  It is not because we do not benefit
from immigration:  we do.  We need immigrants.
We are immigrants.  Even your Comanche
neighbors came here from Asia, longer ago than we know.

When we get afraid,
we do stupid things.

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