Would you harbor me? Would I harbor you?

Mike Araujo’s (pronounced Ah-ROJ-oh’s) parents came to my husband’s little home town of Lexington, Nebraska, in 1950. Mike was then three years old. His folks decided to stop following the beet and corn harvests and settle down. They saw something special in the little town, which began its life in the nineteenth century as Plum Creek. Plum Creek, Johnson Lake and the Platte River all water this fertile farmland and the peaceful energy of the Great Plains in the 1950s lay sweetly on the earth here. The Araujos made a home and a life.

My husband, Jim, played baseball with Mike. Together with their Little League team, they won the Nebraska State Baseball Championship one year. No one then was prejudiced towards the few families of Hispanic origin who had moved to Lexington. Mike’s family was accepted and embraced.

Mike graduated from St. Ann’s High School in 1965 and enlisted in the armed forces. In the course of his service he was wounded in his right hand, his right foot and his right eye and offered disability. However Mike came home and got a job with the U. S. Postal Service instead. Favoring his wounded leg and working around his other battle wounds, he became a postal carrier. He still delivers the mail to my husband’s Mom daily.

Mike was recently awarded a commendation for 30 years of service with the post office. He has also won recognition for many years of community service as the girl’s softball team’s coach in Lexington, carrying on the Little League tradition. He is a family man, with a wife and kids. He is now coaching his own daughter. My husband keeps Mike’s photo out as an inspiration for days when he himself is experiencing a tough day. He knows Mike has it much harder and still is triumphant. That lifts him up.

In the forty years since Mike and my husband played high school sports together, times have changed along Plum Creek. Lexington used to be a village of 5,000 people, with almost the entire population made up of European-Americans, the majority of German or Nordic descent. Everyone looked the same and talked the same.

The Berlin Wall taught us long ago that walls don’t work.

A large meat-packing plant came to town a decade ago and instantly changed things. Thousands of jobs opened up and the area’s population could not begin to fill them. Hispanic people streamed into Lexington to take those jobs. Now Lexington has a population of about 9,000 people and the racial split is about 50-50 between those of European descent and those of Mexican descent.

Prejudice has also come to town, despite the fact that Mexican-Americans in general have a superior work ethic, do their jobs with pride and dignity, worship as do Americans in Christian churches, hew to conservative family values and offer respect to all.

The core of the outer problem is the language barrier. We Americans are not sophisticated in terms of knowing languages other than our own. The joke runs that a person who speaks three languages is tri-lingual; a person who speaks two languages is bi-lingual and a person who speaks one language is an American. It is a funny joke but also a sad truth. We are not fond of strangers these days – we who were all once strangers in this land of opportunity.

Our present national policy towards Mexicans who work in the USA is a fear-based one. Our government wants to build a fence along the Rio Grande to stop these “foreigners” from coming to America.

This is a useless waste of money. The Berlin Wall taught us long ago that walls don’t work. Further, our nation needs and exploits Mexican laborers. The jobs no one here wants would go begging, and we would lack services aplenty, if Mexicans were successfully denied entrance to the USA. Our hypocrisy is monumental in this regard.

My observations are of our outer world, our consensus reality. What inner principle is driving this very distorted policy?