Stranger, Danger

Today I had to go to a nearby small town to get my car fixed. It’s the kind of Midwestern town that has been built around an interstate intersecting with a local highway, one that has gradually spread its tentacles of truck stops, fast-food joints, half-deserted malls, gas stations, and car dealerships ever wider, but that is basically still rural, hillbilly, local, Appalachian here in Southern Illinois. A town nestled so deeply inside the United States that you could drive for an entire day and never reach another country.

I had about a two-hour wait, so I took my students’ final exams to grade. Seeing the papers spread over the table in front of me, the couple in the seats along the wall behind me asked what I did. I told them I teach English to foreigners. The man’s immediate response was: “I wish you’d teach all of them. Cain’t even speak the language – what’re they doin’ here?” Okay. To avoid going there, I told him I teach students who come from abroad to earn university degrees here. His next response was: “Who pays for them to study? I hope not our government!” I assured him their governments usually paid and he was relieved. An aging, tattooed hippie across the room joined the conversation, adding how it was criminal that not everyone in America could speak English and how we let just anyone in when it’s our country, clearly referring to migrant workers.

The first man asked me where my students were from, and I told him Latin America, Asia, and mainly the Middle East: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan (which doesn’t really count as the Middle East, although I suspect they wouldn’t have made that distinction). Mr. Tattoo squinted his eyes and peered thoughtfully into the distance. “You know, how do you really know what they’re thinkin’ and what they’re up to? They act nice but who knows what they’re plottin’ behind our backs?”

I guess I understand that: the unknown is frightening, and if the only images and words the average uninquisitive American ever receives from the mainstream media are evil terrorists insidiously infiltrating the West and creepy, bearded medieval-looking characters who seem to live in caves, that would be a reasonable conclusion. It would be the same as my students in Spain who were convinced that all Americans carry guns and are just a step away from gunning down the entire school, mall, etc., that we live in mortal fear of being shot down every time we leave our homes. After all, what other news do they get of this country but the dramatic bloodbaths wrought by raving fanatics? And what other images do we get of Saudi Arabia (bearded men in gowns), Iraq (the evil Saddam) and Afghanistan (those half-animal cave dwellers)? We always get the striking, electrifying images, the scary ones, the shocking events which seem to be the only fodder for what we call the news and that only fan the flames of misunderstanding and hatred. We never get pictures or stories of everyday, decent people just trying to get through life with some modicum of comfort and happiness, regardless of their country. In other words, we never see what we share with them; we only see what sets them apart from us, what makes them alien, unknown, and thus frightening and threatening.

“Well,” I told him, “my students are great because once you talk to them you realize they’re just like us. Almost every single Muslim student has told me how saddened they were by 9/11, and the Saudis told me how their country was also targeted by Osama Bin-Laden and his folks,” something we never hear in the U.S., the great and only victim.

I went on: “You know, the Muslim women with their faces all covered up are kind of scary and intimidating to us, but as a woman once I get to know them and they take off their headscarves and coverings, they’re as modern as I am, and smart and funny. They just keep it private. And all my students walk around in jeans and carry cell phones. They dance and laugh and will talk your head off. And they work really hard. All they want is a better life, which is all any of us wants, really.”

The other couple had left, but Mr. Tattoo was engaged now. He was softening. “You know, you got something. In my company [the oil pipeline business, it turns out], the only ones who work hard are the Mexicans. The Americans are just lazy and good-for-nothing, so it’s not surprising we’re losing jobs to foreigners.” He went on to tell me about the youthful slothfulness of his own son, which he fortunately remedied through hard lessons. “They’re good guys,” he concluded about his immigrant workers, “I just wish they spoke English.”

“Well, maybe the company can offer them some English classes,” I suggested, not so much as a distinct possibility but as a way of saying that meeting them halfway might work. “Yeah, I’ve even thought about taking a Spanish class,” he said, imagining himself taking a step to bridge that gap. Wow! Where had that bigot gone? Our conversation had gone from trite, pseudo-patriotic “hate them foreigners” to real discussion and consideration of solutions, and of these people as humans worth interacting with instead of scary monsters threatening our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

People are funny. It’s as if my American-ness led him and the other couple to believe that I would naturally be equally outraged at what they perceive as the takeover of America by non-Americans and equally suspicious of foreigners, the expected attitude, at least around here. What they couldn’t have imagined is that I actually feel so much more joined with my students than with them: we share a larger worldview, a sense of the greater world as tangible and important as opposed to distant and abstract; a realization that differences come more from open or closed mindsets than from geographical origins (which are, after all, accidental); a sense that someone different from me is fascinating, not threatening. Yet once these possibilities were brought into the conversation, Mr. Tattoo became reflective and willing to listen; he even defended those “dang furners” who are purportedly taking over our country.

It makes me think that a more educated discourse in the media and among individuals would surely bring this world closer together and build bridges, sow the seeds of understanding and harmony instead of suspicion and hatred, even among people who are arguably as adamantly pro-American and ignorant of the outside world as is possible here in America’s heartland, days from any other country. It makes me think that this would make the world so much smaller and knowable, it would shine light on what unites us instead of what divides us, and it would be so much more productive than the current discourse of hatred, mudslinging and stereotypes, which people who don’t know any better just swallow, their all-American mother’s milk that nursed them into patriotic being.