Around the election my mom was emailing me all these Michelle Obama propaganda emails. You know the sort. They're half bolded, half italicized, largely underlined or in all CAPS. The authors favor red fonts and excessive exclamation marks!!!!!!
I started taking out all of the formatting, removing the extraneous punctuation, and sending them back to her with a "read it again" at the top. All the sudden things didn't seem so awful to her.
I feel proud of her because she's now stepping outside of her intellectual comfort zone a little. She's taken to sending me aggressive forwards with an adorable little note in her part of the email: "Is this true?". Haha. So, she's not exactly thinking for herself, but at least she's having me do her thinking for her. Here's the latest sample email and my response.
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THE LETTER: Had to remove some formatting, but imagine it mostly bolded AND underlined. Especially the first two paragraphs.
LETTER BY A FLORIDA TEACHER -- PLEASE READ
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When will the American People get fed up and do something, or is it too late...
Letter by a Florida teacher . . . A teacher speaks
This is a subject close to my heart. Do you know that we have adult students at the school where I teach who are not US citizens and who get the PELL Grant, which is a federal grant (no pay back required) plus other federal grants to go to school?
One student from the Dominican Republic told me that she didn't want me to find a job for her after she finished my program, because she was getting housing from our housing department and she was getting a PELL Grant which paid for her total tuition and books, plus money leftover.
She was looking into WAIT which gives students a CREDIT CARD for gas to come to school, and into CARIBE which is a special program (check it out - I did) for immigrants and it pays for child care and all sorts of needs while they go to school or training. The one student I just mentioned told me she was not going to be a US Citizen because she plans to return to the Dominican Republic someday and that she 'loves HER country.'
I asked her if she felt guilty taking what the US is giving her and then not even bothering to become a citizen and she told me that it doesn't bother her, because that is what the money is there for and if we are stupid enough to give it she is going to take it!
I asked the CARIBE administration at my school about their program and if you ARE a US citizen, you don't qualify for their program. And all the while, I am working a full day, my son-in-law works more than 60 hours a week, and everyone in my family works and pays for our education.
Something is wrong here. I am sorry but after hearing that they want to sing the National Anthem in Spanish - ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. That's a real slap in the face. Nowhere did they sing it in Italian, Polish, Irish (Celtic), German or any other language because of immigration. It was written by Francis Scott Key and should be sung word for word the way it was written without all the slurs by people who cant sing it well enough to sing it correctly. I don't care whether this offends anyone or not but this is MY COUNTRY. IF IT IS YOUR COUNTRY SPEAK UP -- please pass this along. I am not against immigration -- I just expect immigrants to come through like everyone else. Get a sponsor; have a place to lay your head; have a job; pay your taxes, live by the rules AND LEARN THE LANGUAGE as all other immigrants have in the past -- and GOD BLESS AMERICA!
PART OF THE PROBLEM -Think about this: If you don't want to forward this for fear of offending someone - YOU'RE PART OF THE PROBLEM! It is Time for America to speak up. If you agree -- pass this along, if you don't agree -- delete it!
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MY RESPONSE:
Hi Mom,
Some of the programs she mentions do exist, but the situation she’s describing is one that seems highly unusual and very unfortunately from a strongly biased point of view.
The main thing that sticks out for me is how she describes her one student as being lazy and taking advantage of free money. While this may be the case with that one person, the immigrants I’ve known – particularly from latin American countries – are the hardest working individuals I know. They came here for a better life, because there’s really nowhere else to go. They work terrible jobs – jobs most Americans don’t want – and they work two and three shifts a day. They send half or more of what they earn back home. And many attend school and seek funding where they can. And why shouldn’t they?
I looked into some of the specific organizations that this person mentioned. The organizations that her student is looking into.
WAIT is an org that teaches working adults how to become educators. It teaches them how to become teachers. The classes are ALL at night to accommodate their students’ work schedules. So already the woman who wrote this letter is off base. And if they use the skills learned here to go home and teach in their communities – especially if those communities are rural or under-served, then it seems fine to me.
CARIBE is a program designed for legal, documented immigrants, refugees or assylee status foreigners. So when the author of the letter writes that you can’t get it if you’re a citizen, that’s true. It’s an immigrant program – just like the programs in the early 1900s for Eastern European immigrants that helped women find work, for example. They help people learn English, get their high school equivalence and get technical training. It’s a not for profit org that gets assistance from various US Depts as well as other benevolent organizations. Sounds pretty good to me… I’m really not sure what the teacher is so upset about. I, for one, am glad that there are organizations like this for temporary residents – to help them while they’re here.
As for not “bothering” to become a citizen – that remark is crazy. Or at least uninformed. It takes years of commitment to become a citizen. Students from the US travel to do work exchange programs in other countries all the time, or just to live and study somewhere else for a time. We call it “studying abroad”. Sounds far less egregious when you say it like that. Why would she try to become a citizen when she plans to return home?
Remember when I was applying to SCAD and you encouraged me to get federal aid from the state of Georgia because I’d been living in Georgia for two years? And I did. It went through and I got financial assistance to attend college in a state I ended up living in by accident, for a brief period, and where I added very little to the community. The idea of state financial aid is that people who live there for ages have paid taxes there, have contributed to the local economy, etc. I did not fit that bill as a Georgian, but I got the aid anyway. At the time, we figured… if they’ll give it to us, we’ll take it. Because we need it. That’s the exact same thing this Dominican woman is doing.
To me, it sounds like the teacher who wrote this letter is bitter. She works hard, her son in law works hard. Maybe they’ve just taken what the world has dealt them, and they resent it? And this woman, from a third world country, got herself here and found organizations that she can take advantage of to change the entire landscape of her life. And maybe that’s not an opportunity the teacher found for her own self… Her letter is more a reflection of her own intolerance, I think, than the “problem” of latin American immigrants in our country. The fact that she refers to a Spanish accent singing the national anthem as “slurs” is enough to make me ball up her letter and toss it in the trashcan.
Don’t buy it. And please send my response back to Helen.
LL
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