MAY 1, SUNDAY

EMIGRATION

I recently read an article on how world wide emigration is upending the demographics of Western countries. I can‘t find the article again, which is one of the effects of reading on line. But the general thesis of the article is pretty simple. Increasingly, partly because of the effects of colonialism and climate change that leads to corrupt political leadership in former colonies, people have been escaping from countries that are unbearable to seek a new life in developed Western countries. This is compounded by a decreasing white birthdate and a high nonwhite birthdate in the countries the people are fleeing to. This is leading whites to becoming minorities in countries that consider themselves basically white.

I have wondered since growing up as a child of American missionary parents in India why Western European countries and North American countries, where people think of themselves as being basically white, have become so wealthy and powerful to the extent that they colonized much of the non-white world including India. Why did my family live so well and most Indians didn‘t? It didn‘t make sense, but since I benefitted from this unfairness I accepted unfairness as being simply the way things were. I also wondered how the United States could be so opposed to apartheid in South Africa, with the blacks confined to certain areas, while at the same time having it‘s own forms of segregation and, most of all, by making sure that people of other cultures be confined to other parts of the world and not allowed to immigrate easily to the United States which seemed to me to be a form of enforced worldwide apartheid.

But lately this racial and cultural apartheid in the world is becoming clearer to me as things fall apart.

I have noticed this particularly in Paris and, again, after my first day in London. On Sunday I visited the Apple Store in Westfield Stratford Shopping Centre in Stratford, near my Airbnb. It is said to be the largest mall in Europe. Whether it is or not, it certainly is enormous on four covered levels with one glittering shop after another including the Apple Store. The enormous Sunday crowds streaming through the mall, including those on their way to a West Ham soccer game, were at least 50% of South Asian and African descent. The same was true of the crowded Metro cars in Paris. Both cities were the center of colonial empires which attracted people from all parts of their far flung empire who have often intermarried and been British and French for decades. But from the native dress of many of these people and the languages they were speaking, I‘m guessing that many are very recent immigrants who haven‘t yet adopted British or French customs.

All over Europe, including Germany and Greece where I was before France and England, there were large numbers of Syrians and North African refugees. These people are not the ordinary rural people of those countries, who don‘t have the means or will to emigrate, they are educated and well off people, risk takers, for whom their well being and even lives are at stake if they stay in their war torn or famine plagued countries. Yet, everywhere these people are threatening the established order of their new countries and are certainly threatening white supremacy. Often, soon after they arrive, because they are educated and well to do and risktakers, they do very well and actually contribute a great deal to the new cultures. There is actually a brain drain in which the West benefits, a brain drain we see from Russia and Ukraine today. And since many of these people are young they help balance out aging populations.

But with the good these people bring, including all of the benefits of cultural diversity, comes the threat to the host culture, a threat to white supremacy.

And all of this is increased by technology. When I was a boy in the 1950‘s the only way to get to the United States was a slow boat trip across the Atlantic. It was easy to keep people out. But now people can flit around the world by plane in a matter of hours, zipping in and out of countries. It is almost impossible to keep track of people. Walls, no matter how high, don‘t work. Added to this is that people can work in high tech jobs from almost anywhere, so it is impossible to tell who is in the country and who is not. The old tariff boundaries which kept the rich, rich, and the poor, poor, have collapsed. Globalization means that the walls have come down, that we are really one world.

But countering this are the traditional values of every culture. For white American Protestants Easter came to include Jewish Hannukah and now includes Moslem Ramadan and at some point will include Hindu Holi and already includes, for many people, secular spring break with no religious significance at all.

This cultural shift is an enormous one and too much for many people to bear. Everyones‘ traditional values are upended, the people who got there first and the new comers. Intuitively this creates tremendous tensions, it just doesn‘t feel right. At the same time traditional culture is threatened by LBGQT rights in addition to culture change so fast through new technologies that there are gaps between not just the old and the young but between several generations in between. So of course there is terrific tension and unease and a feeling of not knowing what is up and what is down. And at the same time time honored occupations are vanishing or shifting from one end of the world to the other and are being replaced by new different ones. It is a whirlwind of confusion that we are living within. And all each of us wants is certainty and to be able to hold on to the ways of doing things that we are comfortable with.

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In the United (more and more ununited) States traditional, mostly rural, male, white, fundamentalist, nationalists hope that Trump will lead them back to the past as he promises, in the Middle East Islamists want to go back to the old values, in India Hindu nationalists and in Sri Lanka Buddhist nationalists want to hold on to the old ways. Marie Le Pen wants to go back, Boris Johnson promises to go back, the Ayatollahs in Iran are taking Iran back, Putin wants to go back.

Those of us who want to go forward want to go forward faster to a progressive liberal future, those of us who want to go backward want to put on the brakes to recover a golden past. This leads to greater and greater polarization. And of course, a great number of us are in the middle, wanting to go both directions at once and not sure how to do either. If it weren‘t so serious it would extremely comic. As it is we might blow ourselves up when the tension gets too extreme.

Again, I am confused and stuck. The only way out that I can see for me is to be aware of what is happening, find some way of accepting all sides as being valid to the people holding those views and to try and find some way to muddle through without blowing ourselves up or at least, personally, to find a way to get out of the way if the tension leads to violence in the way that so many Russians and Ukrainians are being forced to do.