[Granville-Hough] 10 Sep 2009 - What Goes Around Comes Around

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Recent Immigrant-bashing Law Brings back History (1993 or 2009).

The illegal immigrant-bashing law recently passed in 1993 which 
prevented illegal immigrants from getting CA driving licenses is much in 
the news these days. The arguments are highly reminiscent of those I 
heard in Mississippi 60 to 65 years ago which had to do with coping with 
an unwanted but exploited racial group in our midst. The arguments could 
be about school integration, voting and pole taxes, or miscegenation. I 
recall how careful one had to be in those arguments because there were 
groups watching to identify a wrong-thinker, whose storage houses and 
barns could catch fire, or whose fences could be cut so crops could be 
trampled by livestock, or whose house could be burglarized (as no one 
had locks.)
All I have to do to remind me of those times and those arguments is to 
take any of the current articles or oral statements on driving licenses 
or health care and make some simple substitutions: for the phrase 
“illegal immigrant,” put in “nigger;” for the “Republican Party,” put in 
“White Citizens Council,” or “Ku Klux Klan.”
So for those of you lining up to sign petitions about these types of 
issues, please consider the precedent you are following.

Just think!! I saw and read there were Republicans who so objected to 
our President speaking to school children that they prevented the 
children from listening. It takes an old Cold War soldier back to the 
days of McCarthy and others who blacklisted patriotic Americans. I 
personally was in charge of designing a stockade in Panama Canal for 
holding 5000 Communist and Communist sympathizers. We were to use the 
old hangars on Albrook Air Force Base. When a staff intelligence officer 
came to check our work, I asked him where these expected Communist 
prisoners were coming from. He acted as though I was a real ignorant 
fellow and said, "Oh, there's that many in the Panama Canal, alone." 
Well, I was there two more years, and I never met one of them.
Something that only a few old soldiers will remember is the "chain of 
command" incident in the Fourth Army headquartered in San Antonio, TX, 
during the Truman Administration. There was a Republican (perhaps a 
Texas Senator or Representative) who learned that we had every soldier 
learn the chain of command from his squad leader through his platoon 
leader, then on to the Commander in Chief, the President of the United 
States. This fellow hated Harry Truman so much he went bunkers over this 
fact. We also had pictures of the higher commanders in each Day Room 
(Recreation Room). We were told informally that if this politician ever 
visited our batteries, we would save ourselves a lot of harassment if we 
just removed the pictures of the Secretary of Defense and of President 
Harry S. Truman until this visitor left. So in a larger sense, what goes 
around comes around.