By Robert P. Bomboy
Like many
of you, I grew up in a coal town, on a ridge behind Kingston in the Wyoming
Valley. We lived on a dirt road with a deep mine 100 yards away and a strip
mine that clawed its way almost to our back door.
Late in the
afternoons I would see long lines of coal miners trudging toward home,
cigarettes dangling from their clenched lips, dinner pails in their hands.
My
neighborhoods, and yours, had streets and streets of Alanos, Butchkos,
Brodginskis, Colarussos, Ermishes, Isleys, Jacewiczs, Malones, Oharas,
Omalleys, and even I, as a nine-year-old in 1950, heard the dirty jokes. That
is, they were nasty, vulgar jokes: “How many Polacks does it take. . . ,” “I
hear your daughter married a Spic. . . ,” “Are you eating spaghetti again
tonight. . . ?,” “duck blood soup, is it?”
The miners
by that time were the sons, or grandsons, or great-grandsons of immigrants –
Polish, Italians, Irish, Lithuanians, Slovaks, Czechs, Russians. We ourselves
are the grandsons and granddaughters, the great-grandsons and
great-granddaughters of frail, tired women who sweated over pedaled sewing
machines and ran all day chasing long lines of silk bobbins, who made lace and
stitched the cuffs of VanHeusen shirts and the hems of other women’s
bargain-basement dresses.
They spoke
a dozen languages and came here, don’t you remember, from the “old country.”
Some died in sweatshop fires or beneath cave-ins deep underground.
Our
President doesn’t remember any of that. He was born with a silver spoon in his
mouth and got a million dollars from his father. He can’t see the Statue of
Liberty from his penthouse in Trump Tower.
But we
should remember. On the graves of our fathers, we should remember, we should
remember, that the ones he insults – the immigrants – could be us.
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